Benefits: - increase speed of package installation - follow python package standards

More information: http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/

Good idea. Will be added in RF 2.8.5 unless too complicated or causes unexpected problems.

This issue covers only Robot Framework itself. You need to submit separate issues for other projects too.

This issue was updated by revision f2505ecdf45e.

Enabled creating wheels by importing setuptools in setup.py when bdist_wheel used.

After this change building wheels requires:

pip install -U setuptools wheel
python setup.py bdist_wheel

Added creating wheel to releasing instructions. This is done.

The first wheel has already been rolled out: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/robotframework/2.8.5

Unfortunately the wheel we uploaded to PyPI breaks installation using pip on Windows. The reason is that our setup.py controls which start-up scripts to create depending on the operating system and interpreter (pybot/rebot, jybot/jyrebot, pybot.bat/rebot.bat, jybot.bat/jyrebot.bat, ipybot.bat/ipyrebot.bat) and with wheels setup.py is not executed. As a result you get non-functioning pybot/rebot on Windows.

As a result we have decided to remove the wheel from PyPI at this point and take a new look at publishing them in RF 2.9 (issue 1734).

If you want to get a wheel now, you can create them by following these instructions:

1) Checkout project source code. 2) Update to 2.8.5 tag by running hg up 2.8.5. 3) Create wheel by running python setup.py bdist_wheel.

Alternatively:

1) Download source distribution from PyPI. 2) Extract the package and go to it on the command line. 3) Create wheel by running python setup.py bdist_wheel.