> Last month, numpy had ~740,000 downloads from PyPI, Hm, given that Windows and Linux wheels have not been available, then that's mostly source installs anyway. Or failed installs -- no shortage of folks trying to pip install numpy on Windows and then having questions about why it doesn't work. Unfortunately, there is no way to know if pip downloads are successful, or if people pip install Numpy, then find out they need some other non-pip-installable packages, and go find another system.
> and there are > probably hundreds of third-party projects that distribute via PyPI and > depend on numpy. I'm not so sure -- see above--as pip install has not been reliable for Numpy for ages, I doubt it. Not that they aren't there, but I doubt it's the primary distribution mechanism. There's been an explosion in the use of conda, and there have been multiple other options for ages: Canopy, python(x,y), Gohlke's builds, etc. So at this point, I think the only people using pip are folks that are set up to build -- mostly Linux. (though Mathew's efforts with the Mac wheels may have created a different story on the Mac). > So concretely our options as a project are: > 1) drop support for pip/PyPI and abandon those users There is no one to abandon -- except the Mac users -- we haven't supported them yet. > 2) continue to support those users fairly poorly, and at substantial > ongoing cost I'm curious what the cost is for this poor support -- throw the source up on PyPi, and we're done. The cost comes in when trying to build binaries... > Option 1 would require overwhelming consensus of the community, which > for better or worse is presumably not going to happen while > substantial portions of that community are still using pip/PyPI. Are they? Which community are we talking about? The community I'd like to target are web developers that aren't doing what they think of as "scientific" applications, but could use a little of the SciPy stack. These folks are committed to pip, and are very reluctant to introduce a difficult dependency. Binary wheels would help these folks, but that is not a community that exists yet ( or it's small, anyway) All that being said, I'd be happy to see binary wheels for the core SciPy stack on PyPi. It would be nice for people to be able to do a bit with Numpy or pandas, it MPL, without having to jump ship to a whole new way of doing things. But we should be realistic about how far it can go. > If > folks interested in pushing things forward can convince them to switch > to conda instead then the calculation changes, but that's just not the > kind of thing that numpy-the-project can do or not do. We can't convince anybody, but we can decide where to expend our efforts. -CHB _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org https://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
