[Python-ideas] Wheels For ...

[Ryan Gonzalez]

On September 6, 2015 12:33:29 PM CDT, "Sven R. Kunze" <srkunze at mail.de> wrote:
>Hi folks,
>
>currently, I came across http://pythonwheels.com/ during researching
>how 
>to make a proper Python distribution for PyPI. I thought it would be 
>great idea to tell other maintainers to upload their content as wheels 
>so I approached a couple of them. Some of them already provided wheels.
>
>Happy being able to have built my own distribution, I discussed the 
>issue at hand with some people and I would like to share my findings
>and 
>propose some ideas:
>
>1) documentation is weirdly split up/distributed and references old
>material
>2) once up and running (setup.cfg, setup.py etc. etc.) it works but 
>everybody needs to do it on their own
>3) more than one way to do (upload, wheel, source/binary etc.) it
>(sigh)
>4) making contact to propose wheels on github or per email is easy 
>otherwise almost impossible or very tedious
>5) reactions went evenly split from "none", "yes", "when ready" to
>"nope"
>
>None: well, okay
>yes: that's good
>when ready: well, okay
>nope: what a pity for wheels; example: 
>https://github.com/simplejson/simplejson/issues/122
>
>I personally find the situation not satisfying. Someone proposes the 
>following solution in form of a question:
>
>Why do developers need to build their distribution themselves?
>
>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.
>

You can already do this with CI services. I wrote a post about doing that with AppVeyor:

http://kirbyfan64.github.io/posts/using-appveyor-to-distribute-python-wheels.html

but the idea behind it should apply easily to Travis and others. In reality, you're probably using a CI service to run your tests anyway, so it might as well build your wheels, too!

>
>With this post, I would like raise awareness of the people in charge of
>
>the Python infrastructure.
>
>
>Best,
>Sven
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