[Python-Dev] Distutils and Distribute roadmap (and some words on Virtualenv, Pip)

[Michael Foord]

Ian Bicking wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 7:32 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> 2009/10/9 Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net>:
>>     
>>> Ian Bicking <ianb <at> colorstudy.com> writes:
>>>       
>>>> Someone mentioned that easy_install provided some things pip didn't;
>>>> outside of multi-versioned installs (which I'm not very enthusiastic
>>>> about) I'm not sure what this is?
>>>>         
>>> http://pip.openplans.org/#differences-from-easy-install
>>>
>>> If it's obsolete the website should be updated...
>>>       
>> Specifically, combine "only installs from source" with "might not work
>> on Windows" and the result is pretty certainly unusable for C
>> extensions on Windows. You can pretty much guarantee that the average
>> user on Windows won't have a C compiler[1], and even if they do, they
>> won't be able to carefully line up all the 3rd party C libraries
>> needed to build some extensions.
>>
>> Binary packages are essential on Windows.
>>     
>
> I'll admit I have some blindness when it comes to Windows.  I agree
> binary installation on Windows is important.  (I don't think it's very
> important on other platforms, or at least not very effective in
> easy_install so it wouldn't be a regression.)
>
> I note some other differences in that document:
>
>   
>> It cannot install from eggs. It only installs from source. (Maybe this will be changed sometime, but it’s low priority.)
>>     
>
> Outside of binaries on Windows, I'm still unsure if installing eggs
> serves a useful purpose.  I'm not sure if eggs are any better than
> wininst binaries either...?
>
>   

Many Windows users would be quite happy if the standard mechanism for 
installing non-source distributions on Windows was via the wininst binaries.

I wonder if it is going to be possible to make this compatible with the 
upcoming distutils package management 'stuff' (querying for installed 
packages, uninstallation etc) since installation/uninstallation goes 
through the Windows system package management feature.  I guess it would 
be eminently possible but require some reasonably high level Windows-fu 
to do.

Michael

>> It doesn’t understand Setuptools extras (like package[test]). This should be added eventually.
>>     
>
> I haven't really seen Setuptools' extras used effectively, so I'm
> unsure if it's a useful feature.  I understand the motivation for
> extras, but motivated features aren't necessarily useful features.
>
>   
>> It is incompatible with some packages that customize distutils or setuptools in their setup.py files.
>>     
>
> I don't have a solution for this, and generally easy_install does not
> perform much better than pip in these cases.  Work in Distribute
> hopefully will apply to this issue.
>
>   


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