[Distutils] What does it mean for Python to "bundle pip"?

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 20 August 2013 14:49, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 20 Aug 2013 05:51, "Paul Moore" <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> But yes, if I made extensive use of binary extensions, I'd hate this
>> approach. That's why I keep saying that the biggest win for wheels will be
>> when they become the common means of distributing Windows binaries on PyPI,
>> in place of wininst/msi.
>
> Scientific users will always be better off with something like
> hashdist/conda, since that ignores platform interoperability and easy
> security updates in favour of hash based reproducibility. Continuum
> Analytics also already take care of providing the prebuilt binary versions.

Hashdist looks useful but it's for people who will build everything
from source (as is basically required in the HPC environments for
which it is designed). This is still problematic on Windows (which is
never used for HPC).

Conda looks interesting though, I'll give that a try soon.

> The pip ecosystem is more appropriate for pure Python code and relatively
> simple C extensions (including cffi bindings).

The core extensions that I would want to put into each and every
virtualenv are things like numpy and matplotlib. These projects have
been reliably providing binary installers for Windows for years and
I'm sure that they will soon be distributing wheels. The current PyPI
binaries for numpy are here:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/numpy
Is it not a fairly simple change to make it so that they're also
uploading wheels?

BTW is there any reason for numpy et al not to start distributing
wheels now? Is any part of the wheel
specification/tooling/infrastructure not complete yet?


Oscar