'pip setup.py bdist_wheel' no longer builds forced non-pure wheels

Question

I have a project that compiles with C extensions on Linux, but without them on Windows. When I first generated the wheel files on Windows with python setup.py bdist_wh

Answer 1

The difference, of course, is in the environment, on the correctly working Win XP there is an older version of the wheel package installed (0.24.0) whereas on Appveyor the latest and greatest (and broken) version 0.26 of wheel gets installed (0.25 is broken as well).

Changing the install stanza in the YAML file to fix the wheel version:

install:
  - |
    %PYTHON%\python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip
    %PYTHON%\python.exe -m pip install wheel==0.24

is enough to get this to work quickly.

You should however upgrade your the wheel package on your Linux box to version 0.28 and then use the new commandline option --plat-name:

python setup.py sdist
python2 setup.py bdist_wheel --plat-name win32
python2 setup.py bdist_wheel --plat-name win_amd64
python3 setup.py bdist_wheel --plat-name win32
python3 setup.py bdist_wheel --plat-name win_amd64

that will generate:

pkg-1.1.tar.gz
dist/pkg-1.1-py2-none-win32.whl
dist/pkg-1.1-py2-none-win32.whl
dist/pkg-1.1-py3-none-win_amd64.whl
dist/pkg-1.1-py3-none-win32.whl
dist/pkg-1.0-cp34-none-win_amd64.whl

which you can upload to PyPI and results in the correct (.tar.gz) file downloading on Linux and the appropriate wheel on Windows. By just making sure that if the --plat-name win... is specified setup() is called with ext_modules=None. The resulting wheel files have minor (line endings in 3 files and their SHA256SUM), but install normally on Windows.

That way you no longer need to build these packages, that are essentially pure packages, on a Windows machine

For me this change by Nate Coraor brings my total build time down from 15+ minutes to about 7 seconds