[Distutils] Expectations on how pip needs to change for Python 3.4

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 15 July 2013 23:39, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal
<chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 3:28 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> There is something like 200 total bdist_msi on PyPI and 5k bdist_wininst.
>
>> To put numbers into perspective, there are ~180k total files uploaded to
>> PyPI.
>
> I don't hink this means that the installers aren't widely used, I
> think it mean they aren't distributed on PyPI.
>
> Installers are really useful for packages that require compiled code
> that depends on external libs -- and most of the major such package
> maintainers provide them.

I second this. I use pip all the time for pure Python packages on
Linux and Windows because it works very well for these. However when
it comes to numpy, matplotlib, wxpython, PyQT4 et al. I wouldn't even
attempt to use pip on Windows.

Most commonly I would do the standard Windows thing of going to the
project website and looking for the downloads page. I've also used
Christian Gohlke's index of science-related Windows binaries [1] which
are supplied as .exe files. He says that "Most binaries are built from
source code found on PyPI..." or in other words if it were easy to
build these with pip then his index would be unnecessary.

When wheel distribution becomes common I hope that this situation will
improve substantially though.


Oscar

[1] http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/