from Hacker News

99% of top Python packages are now wheels

by groodt on 8/3/23, 8:48 AM with 74 comments

  • by pdimitar on 8/3/23, 11:44 AM

    30 years later I still love programming but people given authority opting for cutesy names for critically important terms in the ecosystem should be severely limited in their options.

    Flakes, pills, wheels, eggs... Come on, people. I am willing to bet good money that it won't hurt you physically if you just call them "packages".

  • by omgmajk on 8/3/23, 12:02 PM

    For people who are confused by this:

    "Wheel has an official standard specification. Egg did not. Wheel is a distribution format, i.e a packaging format. 1 Egg was both a distribution format and a runtime installation format (if left zipped), and was designed to be importable.

    Wheel archives do not include .pyc files." [1]

    [1] https://packaging.python.org/discussions/wheel-vs-egg/

  • by Filligree on 8/3/23, 11:37 AM

    How someone not intimately involved with the ecosystem would figure out all this is beyond me.

    There’s probably a blog post somewhere, but Python.org isn’t super helpful when you’re trying to find the equivalent of `cargo run`.

  • by kalekold on 8/3/23, 11:49 AM

    Packages are wheels? lolwut?

    > Wheels are the new standard of Python distribution and are intended to replace eggs.

    Ahhh... ???

  • by TekMol on 8/3/23, 12:10 PM

    Is it possible to publish Python code for others to use simply by putting a repo on a webserver?

    In other words, can someone put a line like this into their requirements.txt file?

    https://somewhere.com/some/git/repo.git

  • by nerdchum on 8/3/23, 11:42 AM

    What does this mean?

  • by wiredfool on 8/3/23, 12:28 PM

    The three that are not wheels are distributed as source tarballs only -- one is AWS Sagemaker that looks like it uses a bunch of native code, one is Apache Spark, and one is futures.

    I think the news here is that there are no packages in the top N that are using an alternate packaging system without using wheel as well. (alternates being msi, exe, or egg)

  • by crawsome on 8/3/23, 12:27 PM

    "new standard" apparently is a PEP from 2012

  • by FloatArtifact on 8/3/23, 1:02 PM

    Yet most projects dropping 32 bit wheels.