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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 17 August 2016 at 15:21, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> While rebranding eggs (or a close derivative) as "pypath entries"
> could help make them more self-explanatory (especially when it comes
> to explaining how the zipped form differs from wheel files), doing so
> wouldn't actually give us any more architectural flexibility in
> practice than the last option.

That said, if folks *did* want to go down this path, then an important
use case to consider is "single archive applications" suitable for use
in services like AWS Lambda and Azure Cloud Functions, where you get a
language runtime to play with, but need to provide everything you want
to run in that environment as a single pre-bundled archive. Similar
problems also show up when building rich client applications for
Windows, Mac OS X, Android and iOS.

This means you want tooling that targets the direct dependency
bundling model, rather than the runtime environment configuration
model favoured by pip and virtualenv.

So this particular challenge *shouldn't* be framed as just a backwards
compatibility and migration concern for buildout et al - the "all
inclusive application bundle" approach is still an important use case,
even though it isn't the lowest common denominator cross-platform
dependency specification, retrieval and installation problem handled
by the default toolchain.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia