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

[Paul Moore]

On 16 August 2016 at 17:49, Ian Cordasco <graffatcolmingov at gmail.com> wrote:
> So perhaps I'm missing something, but why are we talking about trying
> to shoehorn a legacy design into Wheel? Why wouldn't we leave
> bdist_egg alone and start trying to find a better way to replace it?
> We could avoid over-complicating Wheel and we could spend time
> polishing whatever we come up with.

+1

Wheel should remain a distribution format (with running from wheel,
zipped or unzipped, an intentional but unsupported benefit - get-pip
and virtualenv use the feature, but it should be treated as "use at
your own risk").

Egg as distribution format is deprecated and we shouldn't look to
encourage it, but egg as runtime format is fine if people want/need it
(I don't see the value myself, but the work needed to modify something
like buildout to move away from it probably isn't worth it).
Downloading a wheel and converting it to a runtime egg format is
perfectly possible. Whether buildout's preference for not adding
dependencies is sufficient to push setuptools to add support for that
route, I can't say. But I'm perfectly OK with saying that in due
course, we'll stop supporting eggs for distribution (e.g., in terms of
hosting on PyPI) and then provide a period for the likes of
buildout/setuptools to decide how to migrate. If they choose not to,
then fine - we have to decide whether buildout is important enough to
unilaterally block the change. But I don't think we should rush on
this - let's just publish the statement of intent, and then give
projects like buildout the time they need to react.

Paul