[PyQt] Experimental PyQt5 v5.6 Wheels Available

[Phil Thompson]

On 9 Apr 2016, at 10:05 pm, Baz Walter <bazwal at ftml.net> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Which plugins are missing?

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

Developers of PyQt applications as well - but not people who need to develop additional wrappers based on PyQt.

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

A one-off.

Phil