[Distutils] Handling the binary dependency management problem

[Paul Moore]

On 2 December 2013 13:22, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As a quick sanity check question - what is the long-term advice for
>> Christoph (and others like him)? Continue distributing wininst
>> installers? Move to wheels? Move to conda packages? Do whatever you
>> want, we don't care? We're supposedly pushing pip as "the officially
>> supported solution to package management" - how can that be reconciled
>> with *not* advising builders[1] to produce pip-compatible packages?
>
> What Christoph is doing is producing a cross-platform curated binary
> software stack, including external dependencies. That's precisely the
> problem I'm suggesting we *not* try to solve in the core tools any time
> soon, but instead support bootstrapping conda to solve the problem at a
> different layer.

OK. From my perspective, that's *not* what Christoph is doing (I
concede that it might be from his perspective, though). As far as I
know, the only place where Christoph's builds are incompatible with
standard builds is where numpy is involved (where he uses Intel
compiler extensions). But what he does *for me* is to provide binary
builds of lxml, pyyaml, matplotlib, pyside and a number of other
packages that I haven't got the infrastructure set up locally to
build. [He also provides apparently-incompatible binary builds of
scientific packages like numpy/scipy/pandas, but that's a side-issue
and as I get *all* of my scientific packages from him, the
incompatibility is not a visible problem for me]

If the named projects provided Windows binaries, then there would be
no issue with Christoph's stuff. But AFAIK, there is no place I can
get binary builds of matplotlib *except* from Christoph. And lxml
provides limited sets of binaries - there's no Python 3.3 version, for
example. I could continue :-)

Oh, and by the way, in what sense do you mean "cross-platform" here?
Win32 and Win64? Maybe I'm being narrow minded, but I tend to view
"cross platform" as meaning "needs to think about at least two of
Unix, Windows and OSX". The *platform* issues on Windows (and OSX, I
thought) are solved - it's the ABI issues that we've ignored thus far
(successfully till now :-))

But Christoph's site won't go away because of this debate, and as long
as I can find wininst, egg or wheel binaries somewhere, I can maintain
my own personal wheel index. So I don't really care much, and I'll
stop moaning for now. I'll focus my energies on building that personal
index instead.

Paul