On 5 March 2012 18:43, Paul Moore <[email protected]> wrote: > [Resending because I don't think the first try made it to the list...] > > I'm trying to identify which distributions in PyPI need to be made > available in binary format for people without C compilers (i.e., > distributions including C extensions). I could use the classifier > information, but as that is user-supplied, it is not 100% reliable[1]. > (Also, it's not in the data set I have available, although that's a > fixable issue). I'm only interested in existing binary distributions > (eggs and wininst/msi packages) on PyPI. > > The problem is that simply assuming that because a distribution > provides binary installers, or even version-specific installers, is > not enough. For example, look at PyParsing - it provides a > version-specific wininst installer for every Python version, but it's > a pure Python package, and can easily be installed from source. > > I can't see a way of reliably establishing whether a distribution is > "pure Python", and yet distutils/packaging clearly has that > information available when building. Would it be worthwhile adding a > "pure Python" flag to the PyPI classifiers, which could be > automatically populated by packaging? We'd still be reliant on people > who manually maintain metadata getting it correct, but it would help > in many cases (and in particular, in those cases where projects do > regularly upload binary distributions). >
+1 It's useful information for users - if only source distributions are available for packages that require compilation some users can't use them (typically Windows users), so a pure-python flag would be helpful. Michael > > Alternatively, if there is a way of reliably identifying those > packages that can't be installed from source by someone without a > compiler, I'd be interested to know. > > Thanks, > Paul. > _______________________________________________ > Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig > -- http://www.voidspace.org.uk/ May you do good and not evil May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others May you share freely, never taking more than you give. -- the sqlite blessing http://www.sqlite.org/different.html
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