[Python-Dev] Packaging and binary distributions for Python 3.3 (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Fri Oct 7 20:49:19 CEST 2011

I see that the Packaging documentation is now more complete (at least at docs.python.org) - I don't know if it's deemed fully complete yet, but I scanned the documentation and "Installing Python Projects" looks pretty much converted (and very good!!), but "Distributing Python Projects" still has quite a lot of distutils-related text in, and I need to read more deeply to understand if that's because it remains unchanged, or if it is still to be updated.

But one thing struck me - the "Installing Python Projects" document talks about source distributions, but not much about binary distributions.

On Windows, binary distributions are significantly more important than on Unix, because not all users have easy access to a compiler, and more importantly, C library dependencies can be difficult to build, hard to set up, and generally a pain to deal with. The traditional solution was always bdist_wininst installers, and with the advent of setuptools binary eggs started to become common. I've noticed that since pip became more widely used, with its focus on source builds, binary eggs seemed to fade away somewhat. I don't know what format packaging favours.

The problem when Python 3.3 comes out is that bdist_wininst/bdist_msi installers do not interact well with pysetup. And if native virtual environment support becomes part of Python 3.3, they won't work well there either (they don't deal well with today's virtualenv, for that matter). So there will be a need for a pysetup-friendly binary format. I assume that the egg format will fill this role - or is that not the case? What is the current thinking on binary distribution formats for Python 3.3?

The main reason I am asking is that I would like to write an article (or maybe a series of articles) for Python Insider, introducing the new packaging facilities from the point of view of an end user with straightforward needs (whether a package user just looking to manage a set of installed packages, or a module author who just wants to publish his code in a form that satisfies as many people as possible). What I'd hope to do is, as well as showing people all the nice things they can expect to see in Python 3.3, to also start package authors thinking about what they need to do to support their users under the new system. If we get the message out early, and make people aware of the benefits of the new end user tools, then I'm hoping more authors will see the advantage of switching to the new format rather than just sticking with bdist_xxx because "it's always worked".

I suspect I should (re-)join the distutils SIG and take this discussion there. But honestly, I'm not sure I have the time - the traffic was always fairly high, and the number of relevant posts for a casual observer was quite low. So even if that's the right place to go, some pointers to some "high spots" to get me up to speed on the current state of affairs would help.

Thanks, Paul.

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