Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbernoulli | Hacker News Reader

I like pip, but it's too bad that it can only install from source. It's quite a hassle sometimes to round up dependencies and build them all on windows (not to mention not everyone has a compiler installed on windows).

easy_install can install from binary installers or eggs. I'd like to see that added to pip.

View on HN

This is blatantly untrue, pip installs wheels. eggs are dead, easy_install is dead. let them die. We are talking about Python 3.4 here, after all.

I don't know much about the wheel format. But eggs being dead is news to me. You have links for those interested in more info?

here are some wheel links:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wheel

https://wheel.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

https://bitbucket.org/dholth/wheel/

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/

i am using wheel (with pip) as a replacement for .exe installers to install some packages (numpy, scipy, py2exe, etc) on windows. i find it useful because you can automate the installation of a wheel archive using pip (with the typical .exe windows installers you need to click next several times...). the wheel command line utility also knows how to convert existing `.exe` installers to wheel archives.

I read all that, I was more interested in information on the "eggs are dead" assertion.

That feeling of having to keep GBs of Visual Studio 2008 installed merely to be use the most recommended python XML library (lxml). Alternatively you can just add a 2MB egg to the repo.

What is involved in getting a wheel file to pypi so that `pip install lxml` happens out of the box in windows?

Not being able to install from binary installers is so annoying, it's a real shame it doesn't support it. Its the only reason I keep easy_install around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com