[Distutils] matrix: python_versions x supported_plattforms, cross-compiling vs VM

[Paul Moore]

On 27 May 2016 at 17:40, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> On May 27, 2016, at 12:37 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 27 May 2016 at 17:28, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
>>> So I kind of like the idea of making wheels the default for distributing on
>>> PyPi always -- even for pure python modules. And wheels are trivial to build
>>> from pure python packages -- so why not?
>>
>> It would be *really* nice to have some sort of metadata/flag that said
>> "this project is pure Python". Normally, what I want is not *quite*
>> --only-binary, but rather "only binary except for pure Python where
>> I'm happy to take a source distribution". But AFAIK, there's no way
>> for pip to know that :-(
>
>
> The flip side is it should be trivial for pure Python projects to release wheels, often requiring them to do nothing different except ensuring `wheel` is installed and running ``setup.py sdist bdist_wheel` instead of just `setup.py sdist`.

Well, yes. But it pretty much is trivial already, but there are still
a reasonable number of projects that don't do so. My theories as to
why:

- The project hasn't done a new release yet, and doesn't want to
upload a wheel *except* as part of a new release.
- The project has tooling to do a release, and hasn't got round to changing it.
- The project isn't aware of wheels.
- The project doesn't see the value of wheels for pure-python code.

Paul