On 16 April 2012 20:08, Carl Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: >> I heard rumours of plans for pip to support binary packages of some kind >> on Windows, but I don't know the details or current status of that. > > Support for installing binary packages on Windows has been a "patches > welcome" situation for as long as I've used pip (3-4 years?) - all > that's lacking is someone motivated to provide a good patch :-)
Speaking as someone who's looked at this, the problem seems to me to be that pip has a *lot* of baked in assumptions that it's working with source distributions, and it's very hard to see how to fit a binary install mechanism in place. It would be (relatively) easier to add a new "pip bininstall" subcommand, but once you start looking at that, it's not easy to see what it gives you over "easy_install". Personally, I'm waiting to see where the Python 3.3 "packaging" solution fits into all this - as I understand it, it currently hits the same spot as pip (source-install only) but it's less mature. It may be that it will be easier to integrate binary installers into the packaging infrastructure but there's still a lot of debate and no real code in this area (I produced a patch, but it foundered over debates about whether the binary format I proposed was "the right way" to do it). I'd love to see a group of people getting together to really work through the options for binary installers that work with pip/virtualenv/packaging, but the support seems pretty fragmented, and the fact that eggs are a "good enough" solution tends to stall any casual efforts in this direction. Paul. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
