On 16 July 2013 00:12, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benja...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 15 July 2013 23:39, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal > <chris.bar...@noaa.gov> wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 3:28 PM, Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote: > >> There is something like 200 total bdist_msi on PyPI and 5k > bdist_wininst. > > > >> To put numbers into perspective, there are ~180k total files uploaded to > >> PyPI. > > > > I don't hink this means that the installers aren't widely used, I > > think it mean they aren't distributed on PyPI. > > > > Installers are really useful for packages that require compiled code > > that depends on external libs -- and most of the major such package > > maintainers provide them. > > I second this. I use pip all the time for pure Python packages on > Linux and Windows because it works very well for these. However when > it comes to numpy, matplotlib, wxpython, PyQT4 et al. I wouldn't even > attempt to use pip on Windows. > > Most commonly I would do the standard Windows thing of going to the > project website and looking for the downloads page. I've also used > Christian Gohlke's index of science-related Windows binaries [1] which > are supplied as .exe files. He says that "Most binaries are built from > source code found on PyPI..." or in other words if it were easy to > build these with pip then his index would be unnecessary. > > When wheel distribution becomes common I hope that this situation will > improve substantially though. Precisely. At the moment, unless you need to compile code with external dependencies, pip install works fine (it's even fine for C code without dependencies if you have a compiler). But once the build process is even slightly complex, wininst installers are the only real answer. The fact that they don't work on virtualenvs is a pain, but there are 2 ways round this: 1. I believe that easy_install will install wininst installers. I've not tried myself. 2. You can use wheel convert to make wheels out of wininsts, and then pip install those. This is what I do, and it's really effective. I keep a local index of converted wheels to limit the download/convert overhead. I'd like to see more wheels on PyPI and sites like Christoph Gohlke's move to providing wheels, and preferably in a PyPI index style format, so people can pip install *anything*. But obviously that's the authors' (and people like Christoph's) choice. MSI is a lousy format in this context, because it's near-impossible to introspect, and hence convert to a wheel or anything similar. Paul
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