[Python-Dev] updating ensurepip to include wheel

[Donald Stufft]

On August 16, 2015 at 10:41:42 AM, Steven D'Aprano (steve at pearwood.info) wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 02:17:09PM +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
>  
> > Sorry I'm late to this, but I would very much like to see wheel
> > installed with ensurepip on at least Windows.
>  
> I seem to be missing something critical to this entire discussion.
>  
> As I understand it, ensurepip is *only* intended to bootstrap pip
> itself. So the idea is, you install Python, including ensurepip, use
> that to install the latest pip *including wheel*, and Bob's your uncle.
>  
> At worst, you install pip, then install wheel.
>  
> So what is the benefit of including wheel with ensurepip?
>  

pip has an optional dependency on wheel, if you install that optional dependency than you’ll get the implicit wheel cache enabled by default which can drastically improve installation speeds by caching built artifacts (i.e. ``pip instal lxml`` multiple times only compiles it once). The goal is to get more people getting the benefits of that by default instead of requiring them to know they need to ``pip install wheel`` after the fact.

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Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA