[Python-Dev] Packaging and binary distributions

[Paul Moore]

On 30 October 2011 18:04, Ned Deily <nad at acm.org> wrote:
> Has anyone analyzed the current packages on PyPI to see how many provide
> binary distributions and in what format?

A very quick and dirty check:

dmg: 5
rpm: 12
msi: 23
dumb: 132
wininst: 364
egg: 2570

That's number of packages with binary distributions in that format.
It's hard to be sure about egg distributions, as many of these could
be pure-python (there's no way I know, from the PyPI metadata, to
check this).

This is 2913 packages with some form of binary distribution out of
16615 that have a single release on PyPI. I skipped 398 with multiple
releases as I wasn't sure how to capture the data for those... I
suspect they include some important cases, though (I know lxml is in
there, for example).

So: 17% of packages have any binary release. Of those, 88% have eggs,
12% have wininst and the rest are under 5%. Put another way, 2% of all
packages have wininst installers. And 15% have eggs. That's not a lot.

Paul.