[Distutils] distlib and wheel metadata

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Feb 23, 2017 7:46 AM, "Donald Stufft" <donald at stufft.io> wrote:


On Feb 23, 2017, at 6:49 AM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:

(Here's an example I've just run into that involves a == dependency on
a public package: I have a library that needs to access some C API
calls on Windows, but not on other platforms. The natural way to do
this is to split out the CFFI code into its own package,
_mylib_windows_helper or whatever, that has zero public interface, and
have mylib v1.2.3 require "_mylib_windows_helper==1.2.3; os_name ==
'nt'". That way I can distribute one pure-Python wheel + one binary
wheel and everything just works. But there's no sense in which this is
an "integrated application" or anything, it's just a single library
that usually ships in one .whl but sometimes ships in 2 .whls.)

((In actual fact I'm currently not building the package this way
because setuptools makes it extremely painful to actually maintain
that setup. Really I need the ability to build two wheels out of a
single source package. Since we don't have that, I'm instead using
CFFI's slow and semi-deprecated ABI mode, which lets me call C
functions from a pure Python package. But what I described above is
really the "right" solution, it's just tooling limitations that make
it painful.))



Another way of handling this is to just publish a universal wheel and a
Windows binary wheel. Pip will select the more specific one (the binary
one) over the universal wheel when it is available.


Thanks, I was wondering about that :-).

Still, I don't really like this solution in this case, because if someone
did install the universal wheel on Windows it would be totally broken, yet
there'd be no metadata to warn them. (This is a case where the binary isn't
just an acceleration module, but is providing crucial functionality.) Even
if pip wouldn't do this automatically, it's easy to imagine cases where it
would happen.

-n
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