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

[Donald Stufft]

> On Aug 23, 2016, at 4:40 PM, Steve Dower <steve.dower at python.org> wrote:
> 
> On 23Aug2016 0937, Brett Cannon wrote:
>> I should also mention I have never come across anyone at Microsoft use
>> the bdist_msi or bdist_winst installers (I've added Steve to this email
>> in case my experience is wrong).
> 
> In large part this is because I've gotten to them first :)
> 
> Personally I don't like bdist_msi or bdist_winst as neither of them correctly sets dependencies on the underlying Python install, so removing Python does not remove the package. But I can see why people may prefer to use them.

I mean, we have data that suggests that people do *not* prefer to use them since 90% of the downloads for those files are mirrors just mirroring them and 7% is just setuptools tearing the .exe apart to treat it similarly to an .egg (for wininst, for msi it’s like 97% mirroring and only like 400 of them uploaded ever anyways).

> 
> I see no harm in not installing them via pip though. They should be downloadable "associated files" at minimum, and I don't have any opinion about making them available via index data (except that installers should be free to ignore them).
> 
> Cheers,
> Steve


—
Donald Stufft