[Distutils] PEP 527 - Removing Un(der)used file types/extensions on PyPI

[Ian Cordasco]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 2:03 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> On 23.08.2016 18:46, Donald Stufft wrote:
>> Since it seemed like there was enough here for a proper PEP I went ahead and
>> write one up, which is now PEP 527. The tl;dr of it is that:
>>
>> * Everything but sdist, bdist_wheel, and bdist_egg get deprecated.
>
> -1 on removing bdist_wininst and bdist_msi. If PyPI is supposed
> to retain the status of the main website to go search for Python
> package downloads, it needs to be able to provide ways of hosting
> all distribution types which are supported by distutils, including
> ones which target platform configuration management system such as
> the Windows one.
>
> The number of downloads is really irrelevant for this kind of
> argument. Since the PEP proposes to keep the existing uploads
> around, I also don't follow the argument of reduced maintenance.
> PyPI will still have to host and support downloading those file
> types.
>
> To me, all this sounds a lot like eventually turning PyPI into a
> pip package index, which no longer serves the original intent of
> a Python package index. I think that's taking a wrong turn in the
> development of such an index.
>
> IMO, we should aim to reunite separate indexes such as the
> one used for conda or the win32 index maintained by
> Christoph Golke back into PyPI, not create even more
> separation by removing platform specific formats.

I disagree. As it is, tools like Twine only introspect the more common
file formats to upload them to PyPI and has not had a single user
complain about it. Given that Twine is advertised as the preferred
method to upload to PyPI, you might expect that this would have been
requested already. Alas it has not. No one using modern tooling for
package management is uploading these file types.

Even if the statistic of downloads (which actually is valid) doesn't
sway you, maybe this will. Alternatively, maybe you will help maintain
support for these file types in Warehouse?