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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

> I don't remember needing a package that I couldn't install with pip.

I don't think there's even a (reasonable/non-contrived) way that a package could be available to you that pip wouldn't install?

(Or do you mean that you don't remember desiring a library functionality that wasn't available in some package?)

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Some projects are distributed on PyPI as source code, and sometimes that source code has C modules that need to be compiled. The same can be true with packages that ship with Rust modules.

Both might require you to have compiler toolchains installed.

Also some compiled code might need to be statically linked to other deps.

A practical example: on Windows, try 'pip install tokenizers'.

I was curious what would go wrong, this just worked for me:

py -3 -m pip install tokenizers

...

Building wheel for tokenizers (pyproject.toml) ... done

Created wheel for tokenizers: filename=tokenizers-0.13.2-cp311-cp311-win_amd64.whl

Looks like if you try to install it via source you might need a compiler/linker toolchain installed for its Rust bindings.

It's rare, but I've run into packages that don't install easily with pip, due to not having binaries for a specific Python version + platform (something like this one where the combinations of Python+platform+MacOS version are limited, for example - https://pypi.org/project/virgil-crypto-lib/#files ).

Also there are probably tons of "packages" which were never published officially to pypi but exist on github, that people have made public but decided not to maintain.

> Also there are probably tons of "packages" which were never published officially to pypi but exist on github,

I'm doing this from memory, it's hardly a frequent thing for me, but err something like:

    pip install -e git+https://github.com/vonseel/...

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