[Python-Dev] Packaging and binary distributions (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Mon Oct 31 15:59:06 CET 2011

On 31 October 2011 14:22, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

On Mon, 31 Oct 2011 05:59:09 -0400 "Eric V. Smith" <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:

It might be true that such systems don't need binary packages on PyPI, but the original question is about binary package support for the packaging module on non-Windows systems. I think the answer is clearly "yes": I have such systems without compilers. If I build packages on a staging server, I would want to put them on an internal PyPI-like server, for consumption by packaging. So packaging would need to consume these binary packages. And it's not only compilers, it's also external libraries (which are generally not installed by default). For example, to compile pyOpenSSL, you first need to fetch the OpenSSL development headers.

It sounds to me like there's a clear interest in some level of binary distribution support from packaging. Could anyone comment on whether the current level of support is sufficient? (My instinct says it isn't, but I don't want to put words in people's mouths).

If not, a PEP may be the best way to move this forward, but as things stand I'm not entirely clear what that PEP should be proposing. My inclination (to make packaging and pysetup install capable of reading existing binary formats) doesn't seem to be sufficient for most people.

Does anyone want to work with me on coming up with a PEP?

Paul.

PS Should this discussion move somewhere else? Maybe python-ideas or distutils-sig? I'm not sure it's well-formed enough for python-dev at the moment...

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