[Python-ideas] Wheels For ...

[Matthias Bussonnier]

Hi Sven,

Just adding a few comments inline:

On Sun, Sep 6, 2015 at 7:33 PM, Sven R. Kunze <srkunze at mail.de> wrote:

> 3) more than one way to do (upload, wheel, source/binary etc.) it (sigh)

And most are uploading/registering over http (sight)

> nope: what a pity for wheels; example:
> https://github.com/simplejson/simplejson/issues/122

But that's for non pure-python wheels,
wheel can be universal, in which case they are easy to build.

> Why do developers need to build their distribution themselves?

Historical reason. On GitHub, at least it is pretty easy to make Travis-CI
build your wheels, some scientific packages (which are not the easier to build)
have done that, so automation is  possible. And these case need really
particular environements where all aspects of the builds are controlled.

>
> I had not real answer to him, but pondering a while over it, I found it
> really insightful. Viewing this from a different angle, packaging your own
> distribution is actually a waste of time. It is a tedious, error-prone task
> involving no creativity whatsoever. Developers on the other hand are
> actually people with very little time and a lot of creativity at hand which
> should spend better. The logical conclusion would be that PyPI should build
> wheels for the developers for every python/platform combination necessary.

I think that some of that could be done by warehouse at some point:
https://github.com/pypa/warehouse

But you will never be able to cover all. I'm sure people will ask PyPI
to build for windows 98 server version otherwise.

Personally for pure python packages I know use https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flit
which is one of the only packaging tools for which I can remember all the
step to get a package on PyPI without reading the docs.

-- 
M

[Sven, sorry for duplicate :-) ]