rationale.rst

Why use flot?

flot makes it easy to build Python packages, and leaves everything else, like installation, publishing, and other hard things to other tools.

Specifically, the simple things are pure Python packages assembled simply from a bunch of file paths, with no extra build steps. The vast majority of packages on PyPI are like this and flot makes it dead easy to build these packages.

What, specifically, does flot make easy?

• flot builds wheels and sdists, nothing else. No command bloat.
• flot uses only pyproject.toml. No legacy menagerie of many files like a setup.cfg, some ini file, setup.py, MANIFEST.in or other manifest file.
• There is only one way to do things with flot .
• With flot, there is no magic in which files, packages or modules to include in your packages.
• flot can build easily many packages from one code tree. Just create as many pyproject TOML files as you have packages, name them the way you want and you can build all of these without fuss.

About files selection and other efforts

There have been many other efforts to improve the user experience of Python packaging, such as flit, but before flot, these tended to provide complex features with a lot of magic discovery of modules.

Existing tools are trying to be smart about which files to include in a package using magic discovery and guesses; this is byzantine and hard to understand and debug.

Flot explicit files inclusion is better than implicit inclusion. flot assumes little to nothing about your code structure. Files are not automatically included or excluded. Just provide a list of paths or path patterns to include/exclude in your package.

Other options

If your package needs an extra build step, like with native C/C++ code, you can still use flot using the "sdist_scripts" and "wheel_scripts" lists of arbitrary Python scripts. Or you should consider setuptools.