[yt-dev] Binary wheel distribution?

[Nathan Goldbaum]

Hi all,

Recently the python packaging ecosystem has come up with a new way of
sharing binary builds of python packages to end users.  This takes the form
of so-called "binary wheels" (everything in python packaging is a joke
about cheese...).  The main advantage of wheels is that users installing
via pip on Windows and OSX will no longer need compilers to build yt and
installation will also proceed significantly faster. As far as I can tell,
wheels are discouraged on Linux since it's assumed that users will use
their OS package manager to install binary builds. You may even be using
wheels right now - matplotlib, numpy, and many other projects with c
extensions are now distributing wheels on OS X and windows. More
information about wheels is available here:

http://wheel.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
https://python-packaging-user-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

The main downside of wheels is that it's another piece of tooling to
maintain.

I just tested and with a newish version of setuptools and the "wheel"
package installed, our setup script can produce wheels!  You just need to
do "python setup.py bdist_wheel".

I'm curious whether people would be agreeable in principle to uploading
wheels to PyPI as a (semi-)automated part of our release process.  Please
let me know what you think.

-Nathan
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