[Distutils] Deprecating little used file types/extensions on PyPI?

[Donald Stufft]

My main thought regarding this is that bdist_dmg != all dmg files (similarly for msi and wininst). These are specific files created by distutils without a standard or without the needed work to make them truly what users should be using. I also think they are a different class of upload, the general use case for PyPI's current file uploads are for automated installs (as evidenced by the simple API and mirroring).

If we want to enable dmg, msi, etc uploads that are not the bdist_* variety for automated tooling, then we could do something like "related files" people can upload which don't get mirrored for pip and which don't show up in the repo API. Since they will be classified differently we could also do better work around the ux of discovering them and separate them from the 50 wheels that some projects end up uploading and make them more obviously visible. I don't know if pypi as a distribution for _end user_ (vs developer/power user) software makes sense or not, but if it does we should support it better than accidentally via distutils. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 15, 2016, at 4:17 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
> 
> Anyway, like I said: not an expert here, just wanted to make sure the "python for desktop software (even if it's not used much right now)" angle is considered as well.