[Distutils] PEP 517: Open questions around artifact export directories

[Daniel Holth]

Yes, and I worry that certain front ends will generate the zipfile
incorrectly. Better to do it in the back end.

On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 4:57 PM Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 12, 2017, at 09:45 PM, Daniel Holth wrote:
>
> I think all my wheel generators except bdist_wheel build the zipfile
> directly.
>
>
> There is a certain appeal to using the zipped .whl file as the canonical
> format for all tools that produce or consume wheels, rather than defining a
> closely related but distinct 'unpacked wheel' format. A directory and a zip
> file do not have 100% identical features (filename encodings may differ,
> entries in a zip file are ordered, there may be metadata in one format
> that's not present in the other, and so on).
>
> I think we're also making this change in the assumption that frontends
> will be few and backends numerous, so it makes sense to shift more work
> into frontends. That may not necessarily be true - I could imagine more
> frontends emerging while people standardise on just a few backends.
> Jupyter's frontend/kernel separation was initially designed in the belief
> that it would support one kernel and many frontends, but we've ended up
> getting a lot of kernels with just a handful of popular backends.
>
> I don't feel strongly about this - I can build a wheel and then unzip it
> again if that's what the spec says. But given the choice, I'd specify it in
> terms of a zipped .whl file rather than a directory.
>
> Thomas
>
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