[Python-Dev] Re: Stability and change (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one@comcast.net
Wed, 10 Apr 2002 18:32:42 -0400

[Gerhard H=E4ring]

I doubt that there's a lot of input from Windows users for alphas/b= etas for major releases.

As explained before, every time we do a prerelease, the Windows downl= oads account for a large majority of prerelease downloads (most recently, = 3x as many .exe as .tgz downloads off of SourceForge for 2.2.1c2). I have = no idea what Windows users do with them, though, as they sure don't seem to r= eport many bugs against prereleases.

The reason is that if they needed to test their software, they'd al= so need new builds of the third-party packages they use on Windows. Bu= t some of these are hard to build and most users don't know there are perfectly good free compilers for Windows.

Yes, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king .

If it is easier for Tim/the Pythonlabs folks, why not just (for development snapshorts) put the Windows binaries in a zipfile that = can be unzipped and will just work? I fail to see why an installer is absolutely necessary for Windows users.

Explained before; the Windows build tree structure is unusable for mo= st Windows end-users, and the installer contains all the intelligence ab= out how to create a Windows install tree structure. This includes not only m= oving files, but renaming them too (chiefly to give readable text files .tx= t extensions instead of leaving them bare).