Please build sdist, and include tests and documentation sources in them. In Gentoo, we find the ability to run tests prior to installing very important, and our users also have requested offline documentation multiple times.
While technically we could use the underlying repository, there are problems with that. There’s a huge established infrastructure behind downloading archives over HTTPS: mirrors, proxies, checksums. Every VCS requires reinventing this infrastructure, and that never worked well for us.
We have fell back to using automatically generated git snapshots, e.g. from GitHub but they are not guaranteed to be reliable. Only recently GitHub had to revert a change because all hell broke loose when checksums suddenly change. Also note that the recommended setuptools_scm setup has recently been discovered to cause unstable archives.
Even if the package wouldn’t have tests (which would be very bad), sdist has advantages over wheels for Gentoo:
- it uses the same structure as the source repository, so patches usually apply as-is
- tar+gzip are parts of the base Gentoo system while unzip is not — so technically one could end up having to specifically temporarily install unzip in order to unzip the wheel, and we need to unzip it in case user wanted to apply patches
So yes, sdists are more important than wheels. A sdist without wheels works for everyone. A wheel without sdist doesn’t.