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

[Daniel Holth]

Wheel should be updated to support the egg use case before egg is removed.
IIUC this would mostly mean officially supporting 'unzipped wheel' as a
thing you can add to PYTHONPATH, possibly with some additional restrictions
for the specific wheel. We could go a little further and officially support
zipped wheels "if zip safe". We could implement wheel2egg to complement
egg2wheel?

The main reason wheel did not support these use cases from the beginning is
that it was quicker not to. Also, it is a bit confusing for 'unzipped
directory in the (egg/wheel) format', 'archive', and 'plugin you add to
PYTHONPATH' to all have the same name 'eggs'.

We would need to work with the buildout developers on this. Buildout uses a
flat directory full of unzipped eggs, not exactly the uploading to pypi
case, and when installing console_scripts, makes sure the necessary eggs
are added to sys.path in the script itself. The exact mechanism varies
depending on the version of buildout used.

zope.interface is an important package with up-to-date eggs.
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/zope.interface

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 5:41 AM Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 15 August 2016 at 20:09, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> >
> > First off, we currently allow people to upload sdist, bdist_wheel,
> bdist_egg,
> > bdist_dmg, bdist_dumb, bdist_msi, bdist_rpm, and bdist_wininst. However
> I think
> > that we should try to get rid of support for most of these. Just for
> reference
> > currently the number of files uploaded for each type of file looks like:
> >
> > * sdist: 506,585
> > * bdist_wheel: 81,207
> > * bdist_egg: 48,282
> > * bdist_wininst: 14,002
> > * bdist_dumb: 5,502
> > * bdist_msi: 497
> > * bdist_rpm: 464
> > * bdist_dmg: 45
> >
> > Out of all of these, I think that we can easily remove bdist_dmg,
> bdist_rpm,
> > and bdist_dumb. I also believe that there is a strong case for removing
> > bdist_msi and bdist_wininst. I also think we should consider removing
> > bdist_egg.
>
> Overall +1 from me for this.
>
> Some thoughts:
>
> 1. It would be nice to provide some transition process for the
> bdist_wininst case, as these are automatically convertible (with some
> caveats) to wheel using "wheel convert". I'm not suggesting that we do
> an auto-convert, but a way of getting the message out to projects that
> use wininst that there is a migration path might be worth it (although
> it's equally possible that the projects in question are all
> unmaintained, in which case there's not much point in bothering).
> 2. Do we understand the remaining use cases for eggs? AIUI, buildout
> uses it, and I get the impression that there are other specialist
> groups that still use the egg format (the plone community?). While I
> don't think having two binary distribution formats is good for the
> ecosystem (it's confusing for users, and splits effort), I think we
> should be make sure we have those use cases covered (or at least have
> a plan on how we handle the situation) before deprecating the egg
> format.
>
> Paul
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
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>
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