package distribution approach

[GavinHuttley]

Original report by GavinH (Bitbucket: 557058:e40c23e1-e273-4527-a2f8-5de5876e870d, ).

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Should we use flit, poetry or neither?

These tools simplify project distribution to pypi. The questions are:

• do they handle building wheels with compiled code?
• do they play well with conda?

[GavinHuttley]

Original comment by T La (Bitbucket: 5c73c2a3cfbc206be909a286, ).

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The python packaging landscape is quite vast right now, but I found this page quite helpful in answering the above questions: https://realpython.com/pypi-publish-python-package/

Overall, flit is older, poetry is newer, and poetry also functions as a dependency manager. Hence I would lean towards poetry at this stage. Both help with pypi distribution, but can’t help with conda distribution. That said, I currently don’t see why it would be incompatible with conda distribution (via another means, namely the conda upload instructions in #142).

do they handle building wheels with compiled code?

According to the site, “Flit doesn’t support advanced packages like those creating C extensions”. From my brief google searching, I couldn’t find any hits for flit supporting C extensions (which I’m assuming is what is meant by “compiled code”).

Poetry seems to support it as indicated by python-poetry/poetry#11. See sdispater’s response for a working example:

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Yes, it works even though it's not currently documented because I do not know if it will stay this way since it relies on adding kwargs to the setup.py.

Anyway, it you want to test this, you have to specifiy a build script in your pyproject.toml:

[tool.poetry]
build = 'build.py'

that will define a build function that will add the necessary build keyword arguments to the call to setup() in the generated setup.py.

-sdispater

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do they play well with conda?

They won’t help upload the project to conda, but we might and should be able to follow the conda instructions in #142 without flit or poetry interfering.

[GavinHuttley]

Original comment by GavinH (Bitbucket: 557058:e40c23e1-e273-4527-a2f8-5de5876e870d, ).

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Research done, opening a new ticket for the next step.