[Distutils] Plans for binary wheels, and PyPi and OS-X

[Chris Barker]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 2:34 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> > For all platforms *except* Windows, wheels are essentially caches --
> > there is no real reason to distribute them via PyPI at all, because OSx
> > and Linux develpoers will have tools to build them from sdists.
>
That's not at all true -- it IS true of homebrew, etc users, but not the
least bit true of the genreral Mac user:

* Installing XCode is free, but not default, and less than trivial, and
even less than trivial to get right to build python extensions.

* Many packages require third party compiled libs -- even harder to do on
the Mac -- some are a downright pain in the &^%*&.

What if an OSX user wants to install numpy/scipy? How easy is it to do this
> from source (I really don't know)?


A serious pain in the %^&$ -- numpy is pretty easy, but scipy is a
nightmare, requiring Fortran, etc. The community has addressed with with
"scientific python distributions": Anaconda, Canopy, Python(x,y), etc. But
is sure would be nice to have binary wheels on PyPi

And the cache thing is really nice, actually.

> Given PEP 453, it's probably worth allowing wheels on Mac OS X in pip 1.5,
> then we can tackle the thornier general *nix problem in the pip 1.6 time
> frame (which should also improve external dependency handling on Windows
> and Mac OS X as well).
>
Sounds great!



-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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