I think we should be packaging avro for python using wheels, and I've said as much in AVRO-2399, but I'm stumbling on some stuff.
The first stumbling block is that avro has artifacts in ./share that it wants in the package, but the package root starts at ./lang/py. We work around this with a fair amount of complexity in setup.py, but it's error prone and I instinctively don't trust that setuptools has to copy files from outside the package directory. This complexity exists regardless of whether we're building a tarball (sdist), egg or wheel. The second problem I have is that bdist_wheel behaves substantially different from sdist, so I get errors testing with the wheel that I don't get when I test with the sdist. Simply, I guess the wheel is not including something that the sdist includes. It could have to do with package_data, but I guess python packaging is still an arcane practice, and I don't understand what's wrong. (My old complaint is that the python philosophy applies to its language, but not to its packaging and build system. Efforts are in place to fix this, but it's not a solved problem.) Anyway, if anyone is looking for something to work on, particularly if simplifying python packaging is your bag, I could use some help with AVRO-2399. Thanks, Michael
