Purpose of an sdist

[tiran (Christian Heimes)]

@EpicWink

I would expect at least some predictability in platforms. Is there a minimal toolchain and library set that’s expected (eg manylinux2014’s environment)? Or are sdists true source, including Fortran, configuration scripts, etc.

manylinux wheels only work for a very limited combination of operation system, libc, and CPU architecture. If you are running something else than a major Linux distro with glibc on X86_64 or X86, then you are out of luck. If you are on ARM (Raspberry Pi), any BSD, macOS, Alpine (musl libc), Solaris, or more exotic platforms then manylinux won’t help.

Source balls also permit users to compile a binary package with special compiler flags for debugging, performance, or better security. They also allow packagers to backport fixes to older releases.

@EpicWink

One could argue that you can get the tests from the corresponding tag of the package’s repo, and the full documentation from the hosted documentation, both of which could be linked to in the core-metadata (or however it’s stored in the sdist).

For security reasons build systems have limited to no internet access. A distro packager reviews every new release for security issues, signs/hashes the source tar ball and uploads it to an internal CDN. This prevents anybody from tampering with the release.