Add a summary of benefits of wheels over source packages

meshy / pythonwheels

Adoption analysis of Python Wheels: https://pythonwheels.com/

BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License

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Add a summary of benefits of wheels over source packages #16

Closed hynek closed 10 years ago

hynek commented 10 years ago

As this discussion illustrates, there’s need for more enlightenment. The reasons why wheels are awesome aren’t apparent immediately to people who didn’t investigate any further.

This should go directly into “What are wheels?”

Thanks for the shout-out btw. :)

MaddieM4 commented 10 years ago

Let's go ahead and start a list going in here.

Faster installs, even for source packages.
Does not invoke setup.py or run arbitrary code.
Allows for bundling precompiled binaries for multiple platforms in a single wheel file.
More consistent installs across platforms and machines.
Serious caching benefits for testing systems (tox, Travis-CI, etc.)
Capacity for package signing.
Sets your scripts to point to the right interpreter, if they start with b'#!python\n'.
Does not contain .pyc files, which may not match your interpreter (old packages, for example).
All .py files are compiled to .pyc as part of the installation process.
Better design for forward-compatibility and self-descriptiveness.

I'm still probably missing some stuff, but that's a pretty solid start, I think. Anything else that anyone can think of?

MaddieM4 commented 10 years ago

Here's a few more I thought of afterwards:

Designed so that there can be multiple, competing implementations
Not sure the state of this feature in the reference implementation, but a recommended feature is wrapping scripts as .exe files on Windows.

hynek commented 10 years ago

Quick thought: I'd group advantages that do no involve binary data separately (and put first) because the question why to use wheels in these cases will certainly come up more often.

meshy commented 10 years ago

@hynek You're right, the copy doesn't explain very clearly why wheels are awesome. I threw most of it together in a great hurry, so I'll be working over the weekend to try to make everything clearer. Thanks for the great post, there's not a lot of information out there, and it's very helpful!

@campadrenalin That's a great list, thanks! I'll surely be using it to make everything clearer.

LilyFoote commented 10 years ago

Fixed in 2ddcb0e.