[Python-Dev] BDFL delegation for PEP 426 (PyPI metadata 1.3)

[Paul Moore]

On 3 February 2013 11:27, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>> I don't expect anything I want to do to be particularly controversial,
>> but I think it's worth trying to get it right (even if it delays wheel
>> support in pip for a few more weeks).
>
> Will wheel be implemented in distutils?

There are no plans to do so (and I don't think it's necessary,
particularly given the general "distutils is frozen" principle). To
clarify:

- The wheel project provides a bdist_wheel command to build wheels,
but this depends on setuptools/distribute. I don't know how hard it
would be to write a version that didn't depend on them.
- The wheel project provides standalone commands to install wheels,
and to convert eggs and wininst installers to wheels.

The pip integration is basically to allow pip to find wheels on PyPI
or any local indexes you have, and to install them via the "pip
install" command. It also incidentally includes pip support for the
new dist-info metadata format (I can't recall which PEP that is,
sorry) simply because that's the format that wheel uses rather than
the legacy egg-info format.

So it's perfectly possible to use wheels right now, without the pip
integration. But the pip developers don't want to integrate the wheel
format just because it exists - they want the assurance that it's an
accepted format supported by PEPs, hence the interest in getting the 3
wheel PEPs (of which the metadata PEP is the first) accepted.

Paul