On 21 August 2013 21:35, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm reasonably confident the wheel format *doesn't* meet the scientific > community's needs in the general case, and can't be made to do so without a > lot of additional complexity. That's why I explicitly support the > hashdist/conda approach which abandons some of the goals of pip and wheel > (notably, easier handling of security updates and easier conversion to > Linux distro packages) in order to better handle complex binary > dependencies.
While "the general case" may include some specialised situations, in my view, if the wheel format isn't a suitable replacement for bdist_wininst (and by implication, cannot be used by the numpy, scipy and similar projects to deliver Windows binary distributions) - maybe not for specialised use, but certainly for casual users like myself - then it will be essentially a failure. The only reason I am interested in wheels *at all* is as a format that allows me to "pip install" all those projects that currently provide bdist_wininst installers. In the first instance, via "wheel convert", but ultimately by the projects themselves switching from wininst format to wheel (or via some form of build farm mechanism, it doesn't matter to me, as long as the wheels are on PyPI). Note that "wheel convert" is proof that this is the case right now, so this is not setting the bar unreasonably high. Nor am I saying that there's even a problem here at the moment. But if distutils-sig is sending a message that they don't think wheels are a suitable distribution format for (say) numpy or scipy, then I will be very disappointed. Paul
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