An empty cheese shop

Packaging
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Mod note: Split from Where the name "Wheel" comes from? to create new topic instead of resurrecting unrelated old topic. Title chosen based on wording in post.

As the Open Infrastructure is Not Free: A Joint Statement on Sustainable Stewardship – Open Source Security Foundation explains, by hosting binaries, PyPI has essentially became a free-for-all CDN.

Maybe the way forward is to go back to the original roots of an empty cheese shop again. See The Python Package Index Should Get Rid Of Its Training Wheels | Loris Cro's Blog for a very good argument towards that direction.

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This seems like a new topic, not something to append five years later to a question about “wheel”.

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I’ve read this post, and I don’t think it engages sufficiently with the design pressures that brought the Python packaging ecosystem to wheels in the first place: wheels (and their accompanying binary sizes) stem from Python being a glue language, one where user demographics decisively lean away from reliable compiler toolchains (and native dependencies) being a reasonable assumption.

Systems languages (like Zig and Rust) don’t tend to have these problems because they intentionally (and reasonably IMO) support different developer and end-user demographics.

Native dependency management is a lot better - thankfully - than it was 20 years ago, but I can say from direct experience that it’s still extremely common for users to get snared on source distributions, even when they do everything “right” – there are just too many degrees of freedom.

Or an equivalent framing: the mode Rust or Zig user probably knows how to debug linkage and toolchain errors, while the mode Python user is a web developer, a journalist, a data scientist, or in some other domain that uses Python because it abstracts system/native concerns away. Different demographics, different needs.

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It’s quite a contrast to see an article that reckons users building tensorflow from source themselves should be able to reliably do so whilst we also have posts illustrating that we haven’t even really got building pure Python modules from source properly stabilised.

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