[Distutils] Secondary package indexes

[Paul Moore]

On 19 April 2015 at 14:00, Ionel Cristian Mărieș <contact at ionelmc.ro> wrote:
> Probably this has been discussed in the past but I'm asking anyway cause I'm
> not sure what's it at now.
>
> Currently there's this problem with wheels, many package authors don't
> publish them for the platforms I'm using. I'm speaking about the wheels that
> need a compiler and/or other annoying dependencies.
>
> It would be really nice if one could configure pip to look into a secondary
> (external) indexes. This way someone could make his own index with windows
> wheels, another person could make an index with wheels for ubuntu 14.04 and
> people can use those to avoid the pain of compiling the packages.
>
> This is already popular, eg: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ but
> not readily usable with pip.
>
> Maybe PyPI could even provide hosting for these 3rd party wheels, this would
> make publishing very easy and lower the entry bar.
>
> I believe we'll never get package authors to publish wheels for platforms
> they don't care about. But other people might - we just need to make this
> easy and convenient.

I'm not sure exactly what you're suggesting here, but you can add an
extra_index_url to your pip.ini. As far as hosting is concerned, if
you don't want to set up your own package index, binstar offers
pypi-style hosting for wheels. I'm not sure what reasons there may be
for Christoph Gohlke not hosting his wheels in a pip-usable format. It
may be worth someone asking him. I know it'd be nicer for me to point
to his index, rather than downloading the wheels I need and hosting
them myself for my personal use.

Paul