[Distutils] Deprecating little used file types/extensions on PyPI?

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

> On Aug 15, 2016, at 12:09 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
> Next we have bdist_dmg, bdist_msi, and bdist_winist. I'm lumping these together
> because they're all OS specific installers for OSs that don't already have some
> sort of repository. This lack of a repository format for them means that random
> downloads are already the norm for people using these systems. For these, I
> think the usage numbers for bdist_dmg and bdist_msi easily suggest that they
> are not very important to continue to support, but it would be weird to
> eliminate them without also elminating bdist_wininst. The wininst format has
> the most usage out of all of the seldom used formats, however when we look at
> the downloads for the last 30 days only 0.42% of the downloads were for wininst
> files, so I think that it's pretty safe to remove them. I think in the past,
> these were more important due to the lack of real binary packages on Windows,
> but I think in 2016 we have wheel, and Wheel is a better solution. If however
> we want to keep them, then I think it's pretty safe to remove them from our
> /simple/ pages and any future repository pages and modify our mirroring tooling
> to stop mirroring them. IOW, to treat them as some sort of "additional upload"
> rather than release uploads to PyPI.

I think you have a better handle on this than I do, but I did just want to provide a little input.  I think we should be cautious in the way these are disabled, because it's already hard enough to produce user-facing software with Python. We don't want to throw up yet another roadblock to creating a layperson-friendly download.  If they're not used now, it's not necessarily an indication of whether we _want_ them to be used in the future.

Also, since these formats aren't readily 'pip install'-able, and are really only suitable for applications anyway, perhaps the download numbers are skewed?  Automated systems doing 1000s of builds per day are likely to massively inflate download counts even if they're used by a far smaller number of users.

Anyway, like I said: not an expert here, just wanted to make sure the "python for desktop software (even if it's not used much right now)" angle is considered as well.

-glyph

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20160815/a5cb6335/attachment.html>