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

[Donald Stufft]

See https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2016-August/029542.html <https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2016-August/029542.html> for a PEP!

> On Aug 23, 2016, at 12:37 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 23 Aug 2016 at 07:33 Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io <mailto:donald at stufft.io>> wrote:
> 
> > On Aug 23, 2016, at 7:25 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com <mailto:ncoghlan at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> > OK, cool - that gives us all the more reason to retain bdist_wininst
> > and bdist_msi hosting support. However, I do think it makes sense for
> > us to say up front that we'll reconsider that decision if something
> > akin to homebrew gains traction amongst developers running Windows the
> > way homebrew has amongst open source users running Mac OS X.
> 
> 
> I still don’t think there’s a whole lot of benefit to retaining them even
> now. In the last 30 days, 90% of the downloads of bdist_wininst were
> generated by things that I know for a fact to be mirroring clients (almost
> all entirely bandersnatch). The next highest source of downloads was coming
> from setuptools, at 7%. Over 75% of the downloads from setuptools are for
> coverage.py, which tells me that it’s likely being triggered by test_requires
> and would be covered by teaching setuptools how to wheel instead.
> 
> For bdist_msi, 96% of all downloads come from things we know to be mirroring
> clients.
> 
> For bdist_dmg, 97% of all downloads come from things we know to be mirroring
> clients.
> 
> For bdist_egg, 80% of all downloads come from things we know to be mirroring
> clients.
> 
> For reference:
> 
> For sdist, 30% of all downloads come from things we know to be mirroring
> clients.
> 
> For bdist_wheel, 6% of all downloads come from things we know to be mirroring
> clients.
> 
> It’s hard to get per project numbers for these (or at least, it takes a more
> complex query than I can manage with my head here). However, I think it’s
> pretty telling that when you start looking at other formats, not only is the
> primary consumer tools that just indiscriminately download everything from PyPI,
> but almost *all* of the consumers of those files are tools that just
> indiscriminately download everything. Unless there are users of those mirrors who
> follow vastly different usage patterns than what we see on PyPI itself, the primary
> purpose of bdist_wininst, bdist_msi, bdist_dmg, etc on PyPI is to consume disk space
> and bandwidth via the mirroring infrastructure.
> 
> I’d also like to note, that the numbers above are conservative on what they
> consider to be a “mirroring client”. For instance, devpi used to use the default
> requests user-agent, and we see downloads via the requests user agent, but did not
> count them as mirroring clients because it could be some other script doing the
> downloading.
> 
> I should also mention I have never come across anyone at Microsoft use the bdist_msi or bdist_winst installers (I've added Steve to this email in case my experience is wrong). Everyone I have encountered either uses conda or pip+wheels (hence why I keep poking the sdist and build API ideas as I want to give Christophe Gohlke something else to do with his time than provide wheels on Windows).


—
Donald Stufft



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