Plenty of PyPI packages have external dependencies (e.g., anything that uses Cython will require a C compiler). SWIG isn't needed, since it is a source generator, and it's trivial to ship the generated source as part of the release process. GNAT is not commonly installed, but since it's part of GCC, it's packaged for every major OS and distribution. So there's one external dependency that is trivially installed, and many packages have similar requirements.

That's fine. I only use things I can install using on a virtualenv using pip.

For personal projects I'll use workarounds to make things not on pypi work, but don't trust it enough to for work projects.

I've been contacting a lot of older Python graphics projects recently and you would be surprised how many people will do updates (particularly when you supply a patch).

This isn't something I need right now, so you t won't be me this time.

And possibly move from sourceforge