> 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).
I don't think it's worthwhile. It would take forever (literally decades) for this to get into wide use, unless some tool enforces it (e.g. PyPI refuses the upload if there is a C file in the source tarball, yet the package is not marked pure C). > 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. Depends on how reliable you want it. Whatever mechanism someone can propose, I can find a way to cheat that mechanism. However, downloading the source distribution and inspecting it should be fairly reliable. Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig