[Distutils] pip on windows experience

[Vinay Sajip]

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On Sat, 25/1/14, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:


> Wheels are an improvement over the wininst status quo because they
> support virtualenvs. So I want to see numpy wheels available, because
> that would be a significant step in making people aware of some of the
> improvements we're making.
...

> Those people currently either use the wininst installers (which I'm
> *not* advocating that we remove) or they use virtualenvs,  and have the
> view that they have to at a minimum jump through some hoops to get
> numpy to work.
 
I don't know if you're aware that recent versions of distil can convert bdist_wininst installers to wheels. The feature has not been extensively tested, but AFAIK it basically works. For example, with one of Christoph Gohlke's installers (I just happened to run the conversion on POSIX, it should work the same way on Windows):

$ distil package --format=wheel /tmp/numpy-MKL-1.8.0.win32-py3.3.exe 
The following packages were built:
  /tmp/numpy-1.8.0-cp33-none-win32.whl

Installing on Windows in a freshly created venv created with python -m venv::

 C:\Documents and Settings\Vinay>distil -e \temp\venv33 install \temp\numpy-1.8.0-cp33-none-win32.whl
Checking requirements for numpy (1.8.0) ... done.
The following new packages will be installed from a local location:
    numpy (1.8.0)
Installing numpy (1.8.0) ...
Installation completed.

C:\Documents and Settings\Vinay>\temp\venv33\Scripts\python
ActivePython 3.3.2.0 (ActiveState Software Inc.) based on
Python 3.3.2 (default, Sep 16 2013, 23:10:06) [MSC v.1600 32 bit (Intel)] on win
32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import numpy
>>> numpy.__file__
'C:\\temp\\venv33\\lib\\site-packages\\numpy\\__init__.py'
>>>

Of course, that doesn't prove much, other than that the conversion and installation processes can be fairly painless.

I'd be interested in any feedback about these distil features.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip