Distribution as wheel packages

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Wheels (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheel)  are the new standard of python 
distribution and are intended to replace eggs. (see: http://pythonwheels.com/)

Please provide psutil package also as wheel packages (for windows).

To build an individual wheel, run ``python setup.py bdist_wheel``.
It is possible to create a wheel package without changing some source code (I 
dit not try it with psutil but with another project [psycopg2]):
After installing wheel this call is possible:

``python setup.py --command-packages wheel bdist_wheel``

(see: https://docs.python.org/2/distutils/extending.html)

Original issue reported on code.google.com by rosc...@googlemail.com on 19 May 2014 at 9:24

[GoogleCodeExporter]

This is something I've been meaning to investigate for a while now but never 
gotten around it 'cause I'm lazy.  =)
As for Windows: we already provide different .exe installers for each python 
version (2.4 -> 3.4, including 64-bit variants):
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/psutil#downloads
...for a total of 9 .exe files every time a new version of psutil is released.
Does this mean we'll have to provide 9 .wheel files for Windows as well?  

Original comment by g.rodola on 19 May 2014 at 9:41

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I am not quite sure about the number of .wheel files to provide but I guess 
there will (also) be 9.

The wheel packages will also contain the compiled extensions but IMHO the 
installation is much easier: I prefer using requirement.txt files (as 
recommended for pip).

pip 1.5.x defaults to preferring packages in a wheel format so I could install 
all packages with 'pip install -r requirements.txt'.

On MS Windows this is not possible today - several packages depend on c 
extensions and want to be compiled at installation. This requires the 
installation on some kind of Visual Studio (2008 and up). This is possible on a 
development machine but not in production. And even on development machines 
sometimes it would be too much effort to fulfill the requirements for compiling 
this c extensions.
Some package (like psutil) already provide precompiled packages - but there is 
always  the extra step of downloading the package manually and executing it or 
(like I have to do in some projects) add a comment in the requirement.txt and 
prepare my virtualenv before I can lean back and watch 'pip install -r 
requirement.txt' do its work.

This will be the main benefit of providing wheel packages (for me): I do not 
have to worry which packages I manually have to install.

Moreover: You want a green field around psutil on http://pythonwheels.com/! ;-)

Original comment by rosc...@googlemail.com on 22 May 2014 at 6:21

[GoogleCodeExporter]

psutil has been migrated from Google Code to Github (see: 
http://grodola.blogspot.com/2014/05/goodbye-google-code-im-moving-to-github.html
).
Please do NOT reply here but use this instead:
https://github.com/giampaolo/psutil/issues/505

Original comment by g.rodola on 26 May 2014 at 3:02