Christoph Gohlke and compiled packages

[Mats Wichmann]

On 4/11/23 06:03, Roel Schroeven wrote:
> Op 11/04/2023 om 12:58 schreef Chris Angelico:

>> Python itself is fine, but a lot of third-party packages are hard to
>> obtain. So if you need numpy, for instance, or psycopg2, you might
>> need to find an alternative source.
> These days I use pip to install packages, and so far for the things I 
> need it simply works. "pip install numpy" works, same for psycopg2, 
> pillow, pandas, and other packages I use. Conda should work too, for 
> those who use the Anaconda Python distribution. I honestly don't even 
> know how it's done: are there some kind souls who provide the wheels 
> (binary packages) for all those things, or if there is maybe a build 
> farm that does the hard work to make things easy for us.
> 
> In the past I've used Christoph Gohlke's site and I'm very grateful for 
> the service it provided, but these days I don't really need it anymore, 
> luckily.

The deal really is, the instant a new Python version drops (3.11, 3.12, 
etc.) a million people rush to install it, some of whom should know 
better and be more patient.  3rd party packages are their own projects, 
some have binary wheels ready on Python release day, some soon after, 
some months after. That's the main hole this site filled in more recent 
times: for people who feel they must jump forward but their key packages 
were not yet ready, they were probably here. (I should add - it's not 
always impatience, sometimes folks are also being proactive and want to 
test Python betas, etc. so they're prepared, and they'll of course hit 
the same problem of some wheels not being available).

There's even a "readiness" site folks can check (also volunteer-run),

https://pyreadiness.org/

but often the lure of the new shiny thing just wins out.  I predict 
we'll have a flood of anguish again in the fall when 3.12.0 comes out.