On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 7:32 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/10/9 Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net>:
>> Ian Bicking <ianb <at> colorstudy.com> writes:
>>>
>>> Someone mentioned that easy_install provided some things pip didn't;
>>> outside of multi-versioned installs (which I'm not very enthusiastic
>>> about) I'm not sure what this is?
>>
>> http://pip.openplans.org/#differences-from-easy-install
>>
>> If it's obsolete the website should be updated...
>
> Specifically, combine "only installs from source" with "might not work
> on Windows" and the result is pretty certainly unusable for C
> extensions on Windows. You can pretty much guarantee that the average
> user on Windows won't have a C compiler[1], and even if they do, they
> won't be able to carefully line up all the 3rd party C libraries
> needed to build some extensions.
>
> Binary packages are essential on Windows.

I'll admit I have some blindness when it comes to Windows.  I agree
binary installation on Windows is important.  (I don't think it's very
important on other platforms, or at least not very effective in
easy_install so it wouldn't be a regression.)

I note some other differences in that document:

> It cannot install from eggs. It only installs from source. (Maybe this will 
> be changed sometime, but it’s low priority.)

Outside of binaries on Windows, I'm still unsure if installing eggs
serves a useful purpose.  I'm not sure if eggs are any better than
wininst binaries either...?

> It doesn’t understand Setuptools extras (like package[test]). This should be 
> added eventually.

I haven't really seen Setuptools' extras used effectively, so I'm
unsure if it's a useful feature.  I understand the motivation for
extras, but motivated features aren't necessarily useful features.

> It is incompatible with some packages that customize distutils or setuptools 
> in their setup.py files.

I don't have a solution for this, and generally easy_install does not
perform much better than pip in these cases.  Work in Distribute
hopefully will apply to this issue.

-- 
Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org  |  http://topplabs.org/civichacker
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