On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 4:21 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <mar...@v.loewis.de> wrote: >> 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).
distutils/2/packaging should be able to set this automatically. If we do this, maybe the possible values should be yes, no, and don't know. > >> 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. I don't think anyone has a motive to cheat, unless their goal if to be branded a cheater. :) After all, as you point out, if they cheat, they'll be found out pretty quickly. Jim -- Jim Fulton http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfulton _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig