Martin Aspeli wrote:
Stefan Behnel wrote:
Martin Aspeli wrote:
Finally - what about Linux? Is it rarely/never a problem, or should we be trying to make binary eggs there too? Is it possible to make binary eggs that work across the most common distributions? As long as you have a somewhat recent system, installing lxml is trivial here. Plus, updating the system installations of libxml2 and libxslt isn't hard either, so that's a totally different situation than for MacOS.
Right. We haven't had too many complaints yet, at least. It'd be nice to have some binary eggs, though, if they can be done reliably, for people who don't have libxml2/libxslt installed.
I provided binary eggs for AMD64-GNU/Linux at the beginning, and there were a couple of downloads back then (although no feedback on them). However, the various dialects of Linux form a platform that is very easy to target with source code and much harder to target with binary releases. For example, a static build doesn't make any sense here, since most Linux installations have very good package management by now. They automatically update their system libraries from time to time, even without notifying the user (especially for security updates). A static lxml would not benefit from that, whereas a dynamic build will certainly not run on all platforms that lxml supports as a source distribution. So a binary egg that easy_install fetches by default would actually break more than it could fix. The whole problem with MacOS is that it is *not* easy to update the system libraries. That's why a static binary build makes sense. Stefan