Hi,
About the timeline:
- There are 19 open issues on wininst: 13 issues are between 4 and 10 years old. The fact that wininst is not maintained is not a new fact.
- 2016: PEP 527 was approved, it disallows to upload files other than source (sdist: tarball, ZIP) and wheel packages (bdist_wheel) to PyPI.
- July 2019: I created Deprecate bdist_wininst discussion to propose to deprecate distutils bdist_wininst command, there was a consensus to deprecate it.
- January 2021: I created this discussion to actually remove the deprecated command. I saw that people who work on packaging still agree to remove the command, so I removed it.
For me, there is now a clear consensus that wheel binary packages is the way to go according to developers who work on Python packaging.
The What’s New Python 3.10 entry clearly suggests to replace bdist_wininst with wheel. Some wininst features are not supported by wheel packages. It has been discussed that pywin32 requires to run a manual step to support Windows Services. IMO it’s an acceptable trade-off compared to wheel package advantages (ex: support virtual environments).
It has also been said that it’s perfectly fine if wininst installer and distutils bdist_wininst command development continues as a third-party project. People are also free to offer download of wininst EXE installers on their website (but not on PyPI: PEP 527).
I removed bdist_wininst to reduce the Python maintenance burden.