Christoph Gohlke and compiled packages

[Michael Torrie]

On 4/11/23 11:48, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
> 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/

Very true, but it points to the difference between how people install
Python on Windows compared to Linux, which is what Chris was probably
referring to when he said Windows was a nightmare to support.  Usually
when a full version bump of python hits my distros, all the other
packages that need to be rebuilt get rebuilt and install along with the
new python package.  Or often the older version of Python is patched and
continued to be used, not requiring new packages.  So most linux users
never have to go searching for an appropriate version of Numpy, etc.

Whereas Windows only recently has gained a package manager, and as near
as I can tell is not widely used outside of serious developers who use
Visual Studio.  And to make matters worse, MS offers Python in the
Windows Store, which is its own thing and causes much confusion with
users who often end up with more than one version of Python installed.
And nevermind the MingW/MSVC split that affects the distribution of
pre-built binaries, although MS's move to the universal C runtime dll
system might fix this finally (unless C++ is involved).

These are all extremely hard problems to solve, and every solution has
its drawbacks, including the packaging systems used by Linux.
Especially by an open source organization like the PSF.