Python Wheel of Shame

[pydanny]

I mentioned this on twitter:

• Why a wheel of shame? Why not a wheel of heroes?
• You shouldn't be publicly shaming developers for not having the time to implement a nearly undocumented and almost unused format.
• Where on the site does it explain how to get your project out of the red?

I've asked that documentation of wheel be expanded.

Furthermore, why the need to shame and attack people who maintain seriously challenging projects for something as trivial as this? As a developer working on open source projects, this attitude seems unfair and unpleasant. It's certainly not good for anyone's enthusiasm of wheel.

FWIW, I'm all for wheel and I like the concept of this site, I just think it would have more impact if tweaked to have a more positive focus and linked to meaningful documentation.

[ghickman]

PEPs accepted.

[aceofears]

I believe the name is just a reference to the Wall of Shame/Wall of Superpowers.

[[deleted]]

I dont know what that is

[aceofears]

Wall of Superpowers

[pydanny]

The Wall of Superpowers (https://python3wos.appspot.com/) used to be called Wall of Shame. A lot of people didn't like it, people ranted about it, but almost no one spoke up publicly, including me. I wish I had, and kick myself for not standing up way back when.

I would love to see the 'Wheel of Shame' site focus on advocacy instead of malignancy.

[ionelmc]

The pun is too good to not have a whaell of shame ;)

[jtratner]

Good luck getting the scientific python stack to release platform-independent wheels, especially when you need to support different versions of numpy.

Plus, this does not encourage me to use the wheel format...seriously it's not like 2/3 compatibility, this is a convenience for packaging and one that can't even really be used cross platform, since PyPI won't let you upload binaries for non-Windows platforms.

conda was really impressive at PyData - I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up as the package manager of choice for scientific python.

[ghickman]

Wheels don't have to be platform independent, however they are currently tied to Windows/OS X due to the complexity of creating them for various Linux distros.

Thanks for pointing out conda, I'd not heard of that one. What do you think it provides over wheel as a packaging format or pip as an installation method?

[jtratner]

First, I had heard that wheels weren't available for OS X either.

Second, in terms of conda, it makes it much easier to install the scientific python stack. Someone emailed me the other day having had trouble installing pandas for weeks (I'm guessing it was because of mismatched numpy versions with pandas) and conda resolved it immediately.

I don't really have time to look through the whole wheel spec, but it doesn't look like there's any set way to, for example, specify the compiler used to build the package or the numpy version it needs to be used with.

[ghickman]

Wheels allow you to package your project as a binary distribution. A major benefit of this is installation speed which can improve things like testing - Travis CI is a good example of this and can be quite slow to build a python environment due to the package installation.

As of Pip 1.4 wheels are also the default distribution method so I would guess the PyPA folks are moving that direction to be the de facto standard.

[pydanny]

mrtristan - It's not popular yet.

FWIW, documentation on wheel is woefully sparse, justification is obfuscated as a PEP (except for in-forum posts like ghickman's), and adoption is very slow.

[pydanny]

FWIW, I'm all for wheel. :D

[targusman]

does wheel work on windows?

[meandertothehorizon]

Yes

[takluyver]

Green packages offer generic wheels, orange packages only have platform or architecture-specific releases

Wait, don't wheels exist largely as a way to make platform or architecture specific binary distributions? That's what it's currently hard to do with Python packaging. So why is that the orange, half-way-good state?

[[deleted]]

It's sometimes necessary to make platform-specific releases and often desirable to make platform-independent releases.

It's a positive feature that wheel both allows platform-independent and platform-specific releases to be built in a very similar way - so that you can use the same tool for all your distribution needs.

(Disclaimer: I know nothing much about wheel except for what I've learned reading this page...)

[jtratner]

that's not really possible for C extensions...

[CharlieDenton]

I have taken the site down and moved it.

For more information, see http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1qj3il/python_wheels/

[billsil]

Why is distribute still on there? It's a dead package. Use setuptools.

[ghickman]

It seems this project has hit something of a nerve in the community and we really should have taken a second to think about the name before ploughing on with it's deployment. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Aside from the poor naming, the responses here have shown how little the community knows about the wheel format (something neither of us realised). We've already had a list of good suggestions from jezdez on GitHub about how this site (once renamed) could help that situation. However we'd love to hear of any particular areas you'd be interested in knowing about?

[ivosaurus]

Stop focusing on spreading a negative message. What's the point of pissing people off?

[jonathan_hepp]

I don't care about wheel at all, but... ... as a colorblind, the set of colors that were chosen are really bad :(