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

[Paul Moore]

On 23 August 2016 at 04:36, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I meant choco (community archive) and PackageManagement (system
> integration, formerly known as OneGet):
> https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/packagemanagement/2015/04/28/introducing-packagemanagement-in-windows-10/

Neither Chocolatey nor OneGet do any form of repackaging or vendor
management, in the way that Linux distros do, though.

OneGet isn't a package manager - it's a "package manager manager" in
that it simply provides a mechanism to unify *other* package managers
(such as NuGet or Chocolatey) under a single command set.

Chocolatey *is* a package manager, but for projects like Python it
simply provides a script that says "Locate the Python MSI from this
URL, download and install it" - so nothing more than automated
instructions for what users are doing right now. And for Python
packages, it similarly just packages up a script for silent install.
There's very few such bundles for Python packages that I could find at
the moment, but if & when they do get contributed, I'd pretty much
hope that all they did was "pip install foo==1.2.3" (with a bit of
dependency and error checking).

So I don't think that in the medium term there's going to be much
practical change in the state of things on Windows:

- Users install Python from the published python.org installers
- Users install packages using pip and wheels from PyPI
- Plus some exceptions, where people need to use sdists, or
independently published wheels, or worse still, wininst/msi installers
because that's all available

Whether that process is manual, or hidden behind some form of scripted
process, won't alter the underlying infrastructure.

I don't see any sign of *anyone* working on a curated distribution for
Windows along the lines of Linux distros or Homebrew. (Unless you
count cross-platform stacks like conda, which IMO are a different
scenario than "system" Python installs).

Paul