Possibility of adding a wheel to PyPI

[frankier]

This issue is part of my JOSS review.

If you add wheels to PyPI, then the current installation instructions will work as long as the user is using an architecture or a Python version which a wheel has been built for. In case they are not, pip will fall back to the source distribution, so it may still be worth adding that the Python C headers may have to be installed in this case.

Here is the documentation for building a wheel: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/distributing-packages-using-setuptools/#wheels

[derNarr]

Thank you for this suggestion.

At the moment building a wheel or even an sdist with the build package, does not work with the following commands:

python3 -m build --wheel
python3 -m build --sdist

It throughs the following error:

(...)
  File "setup.py", line 12, in finalize_options
    __builtins__.__NUMPY_SETUP__ = False
AttributeError: 'dict' object has no attribute '__NUMPY_SETUP__'

which suggests that either setup.py is incomplete or some dependencies are not installed correctly with build.

Our (old) way of building the package still works, but the wheel, I can build that way has the wrong naming scheme, and I don't want to "fix" it by hand.

python setup.py bdist_wheel
python setup.py sdist

It might still be good to investigate this further and fix/change things so that we can build pyndl with build.

[derNarr]

If we fix and change this, we should document this accordingly in the development documentation.

[frankier]

I can recommend that you use an alternative approach to the current numpy bootstrap to avoid this error. Please see this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/68038058

To elaborate a bit more, the currently advocated approach is to move from having things in setup.py to configuration files, namely pyproject.toml and setup.cfg. The advantage of the configuration file approach is no package code is executed at installation time, which leads to various benefits like faster dependency resolution and reduces the possibility of bad interactions with new Python package management software.

[derNarr]

Wheel building does not work anymore. Somehow building cython wheels with poetry is not straight forward.

For now, I will roll back to sdist only.

Here some useful resources, which might make it possible to publish wheels again:

https://github.com/pypa/cibuildwheel/blob/main/examples/github-deploy.yml
https://github.com/pypa/cibuildwheel