OK. If that’s true, and if the expectation is that there will be little practical change in the availability of binaries on Windows, then I have no problem. I don’t know enough about the other platforms we’re discussing to say anything beyond broad generalisations. So I’m happy to leave the “not-Windows” side of the problem to the experts in those environments.
Quote from @zooba in a footnote[1].
I substituted “a distro” in the quote, because I know that’s what you mean, but I really want to avoid framing this as “PyPI vs Conda” when it’s fundamentally “individual pieces built separately vs everything built all together”.
The problem is that for Windows users, there simply isn’t another example of a “distro” apart from Conda. So in that context, at least, it genuinely is about “PyPI vs Conda”. I understand, and agree with, the principle of not making this confrontational, but I think we should be very explicit about what options actually exist right now, in a practical sense. I’ll refrain from doing any sort of detailed “PyPI vs Conda” comparison, because that’s what we’re trying to avoid here, but IMO it’s really important to understand that when people with a purely Windows background see “you must use a distro”, they really only have “being forced to use conda” as a mental model to inform their views.
But that’s not the difficult part of the question here. (FWIW, I’d be fine with agreeing to that statement). The difficult question is when a distributor doesn’t have prebuilt binaries, what should happen? For example, a library that the distributor doesn’t package. Or a newer version of a package that the distributor has, but hasn’t upgraded yet. Or an older version of a package (because my script was written for the v1.0 API).
And does the answer change depending on whether the code is pure Python or not? Or C with no dependencies? Where do we draw the line?
As an aside, it’s really hard to quote footnote text in Discourse… ↩︎