pip wheel: forcing download of wheels from PyPI

[brutasse]

When running pip wheel against a list of requirements, pip skips packages that already have a wheel available on PyPI. I believe the skip behavior was added in 1.5.

https:/pypa/pip/blob/master/pip/wheel.py#L495

This is a slight annoyance when building a full wheel repository for using with pip --no-index --use-wheel --find-links=… because all the cool packages that provide wheels on PyPI are not available in the local wheel cache.

I wrote a wrapper script that captures pip's output and downloads existing wheels:

https://gist.github.com/brutasse/8476531#file-wheels-py-L52-L63

Could pip gain an option to force download of PyPI wheels? It would make such hacks unnecessary.

[dstufft]

I believe the behavior has always been this, however I don't see any reason not to either allow an option, or just do it by default.

[brutasse]

I'd be totally fine with downloading wheels by default :)

[pfmoore]

This has indeed always been the behaviour (and I agree that it's not always what's desired). I would be +1 on an option to always download. Offhand, I can't think of a reason why it shouldn't be the default, but I guess there may be people who rely on the current behaviour.

[Ivoz]

I can't see how you'd rely on the current behaviour, I think switching would be a lot more intuitive for the vast majority of people.

"Oh, so pip wheel stores wheels of packages for me, neat! looks in wheelhouse folder ...oh, damn, where are half the wheels for the dependencies I listed!? I wanted to do an offline install... :("

goes back and does a google search to find the SO answer explaining the extra flag you have to add, or dives into the docs to find explanation of behaviour

If we were optimistic, in the future where most [in-use] packages are providing wheels, then pip wheel would produce an [almost] empty folder.

[qwcode]

dupe to #1310

[qwcode]

I agree the default should be to download the wheels, vs leaving holes in your wheelhouse.