Christoph Gohlke and compiled packages

[Oscar Benjamin]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2023 at 14:55, Mats Wichmann <mats at wichmann.us> wrote:
>
> On 4/11/23 06:03, Roel Schroeven wrote:
> > Op 11/04/2023 om 12:58 schreef Chris Angelico:
>
> >> Python itself is fine, but a lot of third-party packages are hard to
> >> obtain. So if you need numpy, for instance, or psycopg2, you might
> >> need to find an alternative source.
> > These days I use pip to install packages, and so far for the things I
> > need it simply works. "pip install numpy" works, same for psycopg2,
> > pillow, pandas, and other packages I use. Conda should work too, for
> > those who use the Anaconda Python distribution. I honestly don't even
> > know how it's done: are there some kind souls who provide the wheels
> > (binary packages) for all those things, or if there is maybe a build
> > farm that does the hard work to make things easy for us.
> >
> > In the past I've used Christoph Gohlke's site and I'm very grateful for
> > the service it provided, but these days I don't really need it anymore,
> > luckily.
>
> The deal really is, the instant a new Python version drops (3.11, 3.12,
> etc.) a million people rush to install it, some of whom should know
> better and be more patient.  3rd party packages are their own projects,
> some have binary wheels ready on Python release day, some soon after,
> some months after.

You can hardly blame a lot of people for doing this. A seb search for
"download python" gives this as the first hit:
https://www.python.org/downloads/

I am guessing that the release process automatically updates that page
so that the minute 3.12 gets released the big yellow button will
suggest downloading 3.12.0 as the default option.

Perhaps it is really package authors who should be getting a release
out that is compatible with Python 3.12 before 3.12 itself is
released. It's tricky though because as a maintainer it makes more
sense to wait until you see the finished 3.12 product before making a
release that is fully tested with it (even if you are testing the
alphas etc in CI and making incremental fixes before 3.12 is
released).

The other option could be changing the downloads page so that it does
not suggest 3.12.0 as the default option until it is clear that at
least some baseline of widely used packages have uploaded compatible
wheels.

--
Oscar