[Distutils] [Numpy-discussion] Proposal: stop supporting 'setup.py install'; start requiring 'pip install .' instead

[Paul Moore]

On 8 November 2015 at 13:51, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
> To give an example for Numpy:
>   - there are 5-10 active developers with commit rights
>   - there are 50-100 contributors who submit PRs
>   - there are O(1000) people who read the mailing list
>   - there are O(1 million) downloads/installs per year
> Downloads/users are hard to count correctly, but there are at least 1000x
> more users than developers (this will be the case for many popular
> packages). Those users are often responsible for installing the package
> themselves. They aren't trained programmers, only know Python to the extent
> that they can get their work done, and they don't know much (if anything)
> about packaging, wheels, etc. All they know may be "I have to execute
> `python setup.py install`". Those are the users I'm concerned about. There's
> no reasonable way you can classify/treat them as developers I think.

Agreed. But they (by which I assume you mean the 3rd and 4th
categories in your list) should be using released versions, surely? So
they should be using "pip install <requirement>", not downloading
source and building it.

Maybe they have to download and build right now, but that's precisely
what we're trying to move away from, surely? Only the 100 or so
developers and contributors (plus maybe as many more redistributors
who build platform-specific wheels for platforms the project doesn't
support directly) need to build from source, everyone else just
installs prereleased wheels.

Paul