On 17 July 2013 20:52, Daniel Holth <dho...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 3:39 PM, Barry Warsaw <ba...@python.org> wrote: >> On Jul 17, 2013, at 08:34 PM, Oscar Benjamin wrote: >> >>>I imagined that distro packaging tools would end up using the wheel as >>>an intermediate format when building a deb from a source deb. >> >> Do you mean, the distro would download the wheel or that it would build it >> during the build step for the archive? Probably not the former, as any >> binary >> blobs in a wheel would both violate policy and likely be inappropriate for >> all >> the platforms we build for. >> > > The distro packager will likely only have to type "python -m some_tool > install ... " instead of "setup.py install ...". IIRC distro packaging > normally does installation into some temporary directory which is then > archived to create the distro package. The existence of wheel probably > doesn't make any difference.
Currently sdists provides a relatively uniform interface in the way that the setup.py can be used for build/installation. If non-traditional sdists become commonplace then that will not be the case any more. On the other hand the wheel format provides not just a uniform interface but a formally specified one that I imagine is more suitable for the kind of automated processing that is done by distros. I'm not a distro packager but I imagined that they would find it more convenient to have tools that turn one formally specified format into another than to run the installation in a monkey-patched environment. Oscar _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
