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

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 <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.

Paul.

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