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Comment by boristhespider | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but if we just called them packages the headline would be "99% of top Python packages are now packages"

Which would make the article completely redundant, and that works for me. :D

But let's be serious, they could have just said "99% of the top Python packages upgraded to our new packaging system" which would be much more informative and interesting title and would make me read it in full, as opposed to now when I just facepalmed.

> But let's be serious, they could have just said "99% of the top Python packages upgraded to our new packaging system" which would be much more informative and interesting title

How about "99% of the top Python packages don't require being compiled to install them".

That's one of the biggest wins of wheels. They have pre-compiled binaries for all supported platforms of that package. This typically applies to Python packages that have C dependencies.

And I would have never understood that from a cursory look at the article. Learned it just now from you.

It's number 3 in "advantages of wheels", which is above the fold on my screen and exactly 50 words into the page, including titles.

Fair enough, my point was that the terminology was a put-off. Reads like kids bragging about stuff and not as a technical article.

So without understanding the reasoning why they are not simply called "python packages" but "wheels", so they have distinct meaning, you chose to go on a tirade about why they are not simply called "packages" instead?

The confidence of some HN commentators never ceases to surprise me

(EDIT: made myself sound less conflicting.)

It's not such a stretch to want to understand things quicker as an outsider and be annoyed by a seeming gatekeeping via quirky witty terminology.

Not sure why you used such a conflicting tone as an opposition of that -- I think, fairly reasonable -- stance.

But the Python ecosystem reinvents package systems every few years, so that headline is also not very useful.

True, that's why I question the value of those articles in the first place.

That doesn’t make sense either because pure python packages exist and are actively less useful if distributed as wheels

And I have no clue what you just said. :D

It serves only as a further confusion. But yeah, Python is notorious for its numerous (and likely all sub-optimal) approaches to packaging.

The benefit of wheels is that they’re platform specific so that you don’t need to have a lengthy and dependency ridden compile process, you just install the one that works on your OS and architecture and you’re good. Packages written entirely in Python don’t have this problem since the code is pretty much just copied into dist-packages

I see, thank you, that's much better.

I'd still try to shove the platform-specific stuff in a package manager and delegate that complexity to it.

For various reasons that’s often not an option

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