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Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

Wow, great article. I've heard of wheels for months, but I've never really understood why I should remotely care about them before (it always seemed to me they solved a problem that didn't exist; namely, binary distributions for pure python packages, since you can't support c-plugin packages cleanly with wheel anyhow...).

Turns out the answer is:

1) Yes, you can kind of support packages with c-plugins, if you're specific and careful.

2) They make server deployments significantly faster.

That's actually pretty neat.

...but damn, they still look like a massive pain to work with.

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I confirm about the pain. They should be transparent and you shouldn't need to care about them but that's absolutely not the case. Also, it's the responsibility of the pypi maintener to push wheels on it, but none do this, so you end up building your own wheels while this should have already been done on pypi and it's stupid. And one last thing: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/426700148409135104 "It turns out, Python binary wheels on Python 2 are rejected by PyPI, I suppose because of the lack of UCS tag in the filename."

Apart from all of this pain, I'm very happy to be able to use them.

I'm really waiting for someone to build a "wheel on demand" website that would be a proxy to pypi. Or to turn pypi into a wheel farm (I don't know how realist this idea is).

<- PyPI Administrator.

I have plans for either turning PyPI into a build farm, or making a secondary service that acts as a build farm for PyPI. We've just been more focused on cleaning up other issues.

After being bummed by the removal of 'bundle' in pip and writing an article about how we moved to using wheel for faster deployments[1], we moved to using Packer for server builds for our cloud infrastructure. Now we can backup to using a simple 'requirements.txt' file and not worrying about install and compile speeds.

Removing 'bundle' was painful for us, and I even contributed a bunch of code to 'pip2pi' [2] to make it easy to set up an S3 bucket as a "local" pip mirror for our EC2 infrastructure, but it was all bandaid after bandaid.

So far, Packer has felt much more elegant (despite the effort it took to put it in to our workflow) than wheel, pip2pi, or any other solution.

[1] http://tech.flyclops.com/replacing-pip-bundle-374

[2] https://github.com/wolever/pip2pi

(Edited for grammar.)

Packer's github readme is way too short. Is packer a replacement of pip? Do you have links to learn more about this tool? We're having similar problems, and I'm looking for some alternatives.

Thanks for these links!

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