I'm trying to identify which distributions in PyPI need to be made available in binary format for people without C compilers (i.e., distributions including C extensions). I could use the classifier information, but as that is user-supplied, it is not 100% reliable[1]. (Also, it's not in the data set I have available, although that's a fixable issue). I'm only interested in existing binary distributions (eggs and wininst/msi packages) on PyPI.
The problem is that simply assuming that because a distribution provides binary installers, or even version-specific installers, is not enough. For example, look at PyParsing - it provides a version-specific wininst installer for every Python version, but it's a pure Python package, and can easily be installed from source. I can't see a way of reliably establishing whether a distribution is "pure Python", and yet distutils/packaging clearly has that information available when building. Would it be worthwhile adding a "pure Python" flag to the PyPI classifiers, which could be automatically populated by packaging? We'd still be reliant on people who manually maintain metadata getting it correct, but it would help in many cases (and in particular, in those cases where projects do regularly upload binary distributions). Alternatively, if there is a way of reliably identifying those packages that can't be installed from source by someone without a compiler, I'd be interested to know. Thanks, Paul. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
