[Distutils] pip on windows: life without eggs ok?

[Paul Moore]

On 16 April 2012 23:17, Carl Meyer <carl at oddbird.net> wrote:
> I'm happy to consult with anyone working on this. I think this
> particular framing conflates UI issues (what is the command named?) with
> internal code structure unnecessarily. It's true that much of pip's code
> is for working with sdists and support for installing binary packages
> would require some significant new and separate code paths internally
> (in InstallRequirement and, to a lesser extent, PackageFinder), but the
> actual user-facing commands (e.g. InstallCommand) are a relatively small
> part of the code; I don't think adding a separate command would actually
> save much work over extending the "install" command. But I could be
> wrong - were there specific issues that you saw as problematic for
> adding support to "install"?

It was pretty much what you said - the InstallRequirement changes
would be fairly extensive to factor out the reusable parts from the
bits that only relate to source installs, and the finder changes
(which I hadn't located, but knew would need to be addressed) needed
to locate binary distributions as well as source ones. Also, pip
reuses setuptools to build source packages, but because easy_install
doesn't support --single-version-externally-managed, you can't do that
for a binary, so you have to replicate all that logic within pip.

Thanks, for the offer, though - if the packaging initiative doesn't
come up with anything concrete for 3.3, I might look at this again.
Although as I mentioned, I find that in practice, easy_install is good
enough for most cases where I need binaries, and hand-unpicking the
packages works for the rest (MSI and custom installers).

Paul.