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Comment by thristian | Hacker News Reader

Dear PyPy developers: while I'm happy to download binaries and run them out of my home directory for something I use all the time (like Firefox), for less-frequently used tools I'd much rather set up an Ubuntu PPA to install things system-wide and have them kept up-to-date without my having to think too hard about it.

Unfortunately, the only PyPy PPA I can find on launchpad.net[1] hasn't been updated for a year. Please set up a new PPA, or update the one you have - a lot of curious Python tinkerers would love to try out PyPy on their pet projects!

[1] https://launchpad.net/~pypy/+archive/ppa

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This is the single, bar none, thing that prevents me from using PyPy in my day-to-day programming. It's a huge oversight, in my opinion, and it greatly hinders its adoption.

or get into the debian repos.

I discovered that PyPy used to be in Debian, back in the days of PyPy 1.0, but it was removed because it took so long to build and because it wasn't yet generally useful. The latest releases of PyPy seem to be a lot more useful, and hopefully the build-time is being addressed...

I tried building pypy on my macbook pro w/4 4gb of ram and 2.4 GHz i5. After over an hour I had to give up and cancel it. It took another fifteen minutes for the system to recover enough to where I could start using it again.

I don't know what it was doing but there was a python process that was using every bit of CPU available and a ton of swap.

This same machine can build ruby 1.9.2 in under 10 minutes. It took less time to download and refresh all of my installed macports (including postgresql 9.0) than it took to attempt to build pypy.

Even though the documentation[1] says you need at least 4GB of RAM to build 64-bit PyPy, I've never successfully building PyPy on a 4GB machine. It took about 20 minutes to successfully build on a machine with 8GB RAM, though.

[1]: http://pypy.org/download.html

AFAIK, the build time is unlikely to change any time soon, since it's a complex process doing whole-program analysis on an interpreter, and translating it to a lower level binary.

It does however build much, much faster on PyPy.

A yum repository for Fedora 15 is welcome as well.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PyPyStack

  PyPy has been packaged within Fedora from Fedora 15
  onwards, and is available via:

  yum install pypy

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