Second draft.
-Barry
=== modified file 'debian/python-policy.sgml'
--- debian/python-policy.sgml 2014-05-12 10:21:25 +0000
+++ debian/python-policy.sgml 2014-05-16 18:08:52 +0000
@@ -32,7 +32,11 @@
<name>Scott Kitterman</name>
<email>sc...@kitterman.com</email>
</author>
- <version>version 0.9.5</version>
+ <author>
+ <name>Barry Warsaw</name>
+ <email>ba...@debian.org</email>
+ </author>
+ <version>version 0.9.6</version>
<abstract>
This document describes the packaging of Python within the
@@ -468,6 +472,45 @@
programs included in the same package.
</p>
</sect>
+ <sect id="wheels">
+ <heading>Wheels</heading>
+ <p>
+ <url id="http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/";
+ name="PEP 427">
+ defines a built-package format called "wheels", which is a zip
+ format archive containing Python code and a "dist-info" metadata
+ directory, in a single file named with the .whl suffix. As zip
+ files, wheels containing pure-Python can be put on sys.path and
+ modules in the wheel can be imported directly by Python's "import"
+ statement. (Importing extension modules from wheels is not yet
+ supported as of Python 3.4.)
+ </p><p>
+ In general, packages must not build or provide wheels. They are
+ redundant to the established way of providing Python libraries to
+ Debian users, take no advantage of distro-based tools, and are less
+ convenient to use. E.g. they must be explicitly added to sys.path,
+ cannot be easily grepped, and stack traces through zips are more
+ difficult to debug.
+ </p><p>
+ A very limited set of wheel packages are available in the archive,
+ but these support the narrow purpose of providing the Python 3
+ built-in virtual environment creation
+ executable <prgn>pyvenv-3.x</prgn>, as well as the
+ within-venv <prgn>pip</prgn> executable, in a Debian policy
+ compliant way. The set of packages providing wheels for this
+ purpose are (by source package name): chardet, distlib, html5lib,
+ python-colorama, python-setuptools, python-urllib3, requests, six,
+ urllib3.
+ </p><p>
+ Wheels supporting <prgn>pyvenv</prgn> and <prgn>pip</prgn> are named
+ with the <var>python-</var> prefix, and the <var>-wheels</var>
+ suffix, e.g. <package>python-chardet-wheels</package>. When these
+ binary packages are installed, their .whl files must be placed in
+ the /usr/share/python-wheels directory. Such wheels must be built
+ with the <tt>--universal</tt> flag so as to generate wheels
+ compatible with both Python 2 and Python 3.
+ </p>
+ </sect>
<sect id="package_names">
<heading>Module Package Names</heading>
<p>
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
