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

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

> On Aug 15, 2016, at 1:56 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
> 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).

I guess I'm just a little confused - are we talking about just hiding them from some parts of the API or disallowing their upload entirely?

If we're talking about the literal output of bdist_dmg and bdist_rpm I probably agree that they're almost useless.

> 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. 

My concern here is that if someone has a hacky workaround working with the current system, it might be better to add support for the new thing ("related files") before killing the old thing.  If the plan is to do them both anyway, wouldn't it be better to do it in that order?  As a community (and I mean the broader open source community here, not distutils-sig; if anything distutils is way better about this) we have an unfortunate habit of killing potentially-useful-but-sub-optimal stuff, wandering off for half a decade, and then only adding the better thing after the fact.

-glyph