[Distutils] Deprecating little used file types/extensions on PyPI?

[Paul Moore]

On 15 August 2016 at 20:09, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
> First off, we currently allow people to upload sdist, bdist_wheel, bdist_egg,
> bdist_dmg, bdist_dumb, bdist_msi, bdist_rpm, and bdist_wininst. However I think
> that we should try to get rid of support for most of these. Just for reference
> currently the number of files uploaded for each type of file looks like:
>
> * sdist: 506,585
> * bdist_wheel: 81,207
> * bdist_egg: 48,282
> * bdist_wininst: 14,002
> * bdist_dumb: 5,502
> * bdist_msi: 497
> * bdist_rpm: 464
> * bdist_dmg: 45
>
> Out of all of these, I think that we can easily remove bdist_dmg, bdist_rpm,
> and bdist_dumb. I also believe that there is a strong case for removing
> bdist_msi and bdist_wininst. I also think we should consider removing
> bdist_egg.

Overall +1 from me for this.

Some thoughts:

1. It would be nice to provide some transition process for the
bdist_wininst case, as these are automatically convertible (with some
caveats) to wheel using "wheel convert". I'm not suggesting that we do
an auto-convert, but a way of getting the message out to projects that
use wininst that there is a migration path might be worth it (although
it's equally possible that the projects in question are all
unmaintained, in which case there's not much point in bothering).
2. Do we understand the remaining use cases for eggs? AIUI, buildout
uses it, and I get the impression that there are other specialist
groups that still use the egg format (the plone community?). While I
don't think having two binary distribution formats is good for the
ecosystem (it's confusing for users, and splits effort), I think we
should be make sure we have those use cases covered (or at least have
a plan on how we handle the situation) before deprecating the egg
format.

Paul