.pyc files are included in wheels

@lamby filed https://bugs.debian.org/1005825 in Debian:

Whilst working on the Reproducible Builds effort we noticed that hatchling could not be built reproducibly. This is because it included the checksums of (unshipped) .pyc files in the RECORD file. A patch is attached that strips them out; this change is analogous to a similar conditional later in the wheel.py file.

He supplied a patch to strip .pyc files from RECORD.

But I’d suggest that we go a step further and exclude the .pyc files from the generated wheels, entirely. While Debian didn’t ship the .pyc files, due to packaging tooling, they are in generated wheels.

This would be what most other packaging tools do, and in line with PEP 427, which states:

1. Wheel, being an installation format that is intended to work across multiple versions of Python, does not generally include .pyc files.

I would have filed a PR to do this, but I’m not entirely sure what your preferred mechanism to implement the exclusion would be. It could be defaulting to exclude __pycache__ directories, or .pyc files, using the existing exclusion mechanisms, or a hardcoded exclusion for .pyc files in recurse_project_files().

[lamby]

(Yep, not wedded to the idea of only stripping the .pyc references from RECORD; I was merely following the principle of providing the minimal possible patch.)

[stefanor]

Thanks!