setup: make a universal wheel

[benoit-pierre]

Default to creating an universal wheel.

[codecov-io]

Codecov Report

Merging #16 into master will not change coverage. The diff coverage is n/a.

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[chfw]

Can you share with me the usage of "bdist_wheel" in your perspective? I am afraid I am not a user of wheels yet.

[benoit-pierre]

The http://pythonwheels.com/ site sums it up nicely:

Advantages of wheels:

1. Faster installation for pure python and native C extension packages.
2. Avoids arbitrary code execution for installation. (Avoids setup.py)
3. Installation of a C extension does not require a compiler on Windows or macOS.
4. Allows better caching for testing and continuous integration.
5. Creates .pyc files as part of installation to ensure they match the python interpreter used.
6. More consistent installs across platforms and machines.

For Plover we cache wheels of our dependencies to reduce build times on Travis CI/AppVeyor. We're also going to use setuptools' entrypoints for plugins, and pip to install those plugins, so avoiding 2 and 3 is pretty critical:

• having to run setup.py for installing a package can mean a completely different set of dependencies needs to be installed (setup_requires), and they're going to be handled by a completely separate mechanism: setuptools' easy_install, with no sharing if multiple packages need the same dependencies, and no use of wheels (not supported by easy_install) (so you'll compile Cython 3 times if you have 3 packages that depend on it during their setup phase)
• and of course, if the package does need to compile a C extension and you don't have a compiler (Windows/macOS, but also Linux when using something like an AppImage): then it's game over

[chfw]

Thanks for the sharing. I am starting to distribute wheels now.