[PyQt] Experimental PyQt5 v5.6 Wheels Available

[Baz Walter]

On 09/04/16 17:49, Phil Thompson wrote:
> I've created wheels for SIP and PyQt5 v5.6 snapshots that are
> available from their respective download pages. They are for the
> following architectures:
>
> Linux 64-bits OS X 64-bits Windows 64-bits Windows 32-bits
>
> The PyQt5 wheels contain a minimal copy of Qt v5.6 - only those parts
> needed to support PyQt. They include pyuic5 but not (yet) pyrcc5 and
> pylupdate5. They do not contain QScintilla - there will be separate
> wheels for that.
>
> Please give feedback.
>
> I'm particularly interested in how well the Linux wheel works across
> different Linux distros. They were created on Ubuntu.

Everything installed fine for me on an up to date Arch-Linux. I did 
minimal testing, but it all seems to be working as expected.

> The wheels have not been uploaded to PyPi because the PyQt wheels are
> too large, which is a shame. My original plan was to *not* bundle Qt.
> However that means that PyQt has to make assumptions about where Qt
> has been installed. The only reasonable assumption is the default
> location used by the Qt installers (ie. ~/Qt5.6.0 on Linux and OS X
> and C:\Qt\Qt5.6.0 on Windows). I thought that was going to be too
> restrictive.
>
> I'd like feedback on the best approach to this...
>
> 1. Stick with the current approach, unable to use PyPi, large
> download, simple install once downloaded, supports non-default Qt
> locations.
> 2. Don't bundle Qt, can use PyPi, small download, simple install, Qt
> must be installed in its default location.
>
> I could supplement 2) with a tool (provided as part of the wheel)
> that could be run (once) to "re-direct" the installed PyQt to the
> actual Qt installation.
>
> A further variation would be a separate tool that would modify the
> downloaded wheel to do the re-direct so that the modified wheel would
> be correct for your personal/company standards for the Qt location.
>
> Thoughts?

It definitely seems that some variant of (2) + tool is to be preferred. 
One immediate issue I noticed is that things like style plugins need to 
be copied to the bundled Qt installation in order to get full 
equivalence with a normal system installation. Not exactly a big deal, 
but there's no need to worry about little details like that if it's 
possible to target an existing Qt installation.

But what exactly is the main purpose of these wheels? Are they primarily 
aimed at users who just need to run PyQt applications?

And will you always provide wheels for snapshots, or is the current 
release just a one-off?

-- 
Regards
Baz Walter