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

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Fri Oct 9 14:32:43 CEST 2009

2009/10/9 Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net>:

Ian Bicking <ianb colorstudy.com> writes:

Someone mentioned that easyinstall 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.

Paul.

[1] Heck, some extensions only build with mingw, others only build with MSVC. You need two compilers :-(

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