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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 23 August 2016 at 06:53,  <tritium-list at sdamon.com> wrote:
>> The rationale for why the Windows formats get to stay when the other
>> platform specific formats are being dropped is implied by that last
>> line: we're expecting users on other platforms to be more comfortable
>> with using platform specific tooling to manage platform specific
>> formats (e.g. the system package manager on Linux, homebrew on Mac OS
>> X).
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Nick.
>
> I'm a heavy Windows user.  Are you aware of a system package manager that I am not?  There's nuget (vs), choco (third party) and the Windows Store ...

I meant choco (community archive) and PackageManagement (system
integration, formerly known as OneGet):
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/packagemanagement/2015/04/28/introducing-packagemanagement-in-windows-10/

There's also the option of using conda and conda-forge as an option a
bit closer to what you get using homebrew on Mac OS X.

The reason I think we need to keep bdist_wininst and bdist_msi support
on PyPI for the time being is simply the fact that the idea of
software repositories and automated software management (rather than
downloading EXEs and MSIs through your web browser and running them)
is still a relatively novel concept on Windows, so it's going to take
time for it to be as accepted amongst Windows-focused Pythonistas as
comparable tools are amongst *nix focused developers.

However, now that Microsoft is actually providing support for
automated software management, I also think we should be encouraging
people to move in that direction, and if we're successful in that,
then eventually we'll be able to drop bdist_wininst and bdist_msi as
well, and nobody will miss them (since they're getting them from the
Chocalatey repo instead).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia