[Cryptography-dev] Building cryptography on Windows for Python 3.3

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

On 02/20/2014 10:30 AM, Paul Kehrer wrote:
> We will be offering wheels (32-bit) for the 0.2 release (forthcoming
> today), but as you noted they still require the installation of
> OpenSSL independently. This decision was originally made because we
> didn't want to get in the business of feeling like we needed to rev
> cryptography whenever OpenSSL did a security release, but maybe we
> need to revisit that position.
>
> Everyone, time to express some opinions!

The average end user will probably find this to be a significant road
block.  This is particularly true if the failure mode for OpenSSL not
being installed is a random implementation-specific traceback (perhaps
one that gets thrown away because the Windows GUI program has no console).

One solution to this is for the application developer to bundle
everything - Python, cryptography, OpenSSL, their own application, code,
etc.  For this solution, it doesn't really matter what cryptography does
because cryptography's packaging efforts will mostly be ignored (maybe
not completely?  perhaps having incomplete binary wheels for Windows
makes the packager's life easier - I'm not sure).

The other solution is for the meager Python installation management
tools (easy_install and pip) to actually work.  This seems like the
solution where wheels (or, sorry, eggs) are more relevant.  If /pip
install mycryptoapp/ actually produces a working application then
*maybe* that's a tolerable experience for an average end user on Windows
(considering it requires running commands in a console, I'm not so sure
- but maybe pip will have a GUI someday).

If /pip install mycryptoapp/ appears to succeed but produces a broken
installation that fails with random tracebacks, there's basically no way
any end users on Windows are going to benefit.

Jean-Paul

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