[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3

[Tim Golden]

On 22/06/2012 13:14, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Jun 22, 2012, at 12:27 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
> 
>> And what I am trying to say is that no matter how much effort gets put
>> into trying to make build from source easy, it'll pretty much always
>> not be even remotely trivial on Windows.
> 
> It seems to me that a "Windows build service" is something the Python
> infrastructure could support.  This would be analogous to the types of binary
> build services Linux distros provide, e.g. the normal Ubuntu workflow of
> uploading a source package to a build daemon, which churns away for a while,
> and results in platform-specific binary packages which can be directly
> installed on an end-user system.

The devil would be in the details. As Paul Moore pointed out earlier,
building *any* extension which relies on some 3rd-party library on
Windows (mysql, libxml, sdl, whatever) can be an exercise in iterative
frustration as you discover build requirements on build requirements.
This isn't just down to Python: try building TortoiseSvn by yourself,
for example.

That's not say that this is insurmountable. Christopher Gohlke has
for a long while maintained an unofficial binary store at his site:

  http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

but I've no idea how much work he's had to put in to get all the
dependencies built.

Someone who just turned up with a new build:
"Here's a Python interface for ToastRack -- the new card-printing
service" would need a way to provide the proposed build infrastructure
with what was needed to build the library behind the Python extension.

Little fleas have smaller fleas... and so on.

TJG