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by hprotagonist 2500 days ago
There's no immediate mention of this on the site, but -- why did they select the package formats that they did?

I'd love to be able to host wheels for my python projects, or {rpm, deb, flatpack, etc...} for effectively arbitrary code. Is that in the works?

4 comments

Running a python package registry has some unique challenges, so it makes sense not to start with it (I run such a registry: https://pydist.com).

For example, Python has a distinction between distributions (the actual file downloaded, e.g. a tarfile or a manylinux1 wheel) and versions that doesn't exist in most other languages.

All of these concerns are handled on client side, in the end all python needs is an http server, it can be actually hosted on S3.
Some function of popularity on the platform and ease of implementation, I'm sure.

And, I suspect (from python's noteworthy absence), degree to which the language's users were already (mis)using GitHub releases (or sites) for this purpose.

yes but i

  pip install git+https://github.com...
very often!
Perhaps because pip already supports git repos:

    git+ssh://git@bitbucket.org/foo/bar.git@fixit/atemp69#egg=hotshit
And it also works from requirements.txt
> There's no immediate mention of this on the site, but -- why did they select the package formats that they did?

Don't know but the formats do not seem to match the Azure DevOps package feeds formats (some overlap of course but some missing in one, some missing in the other) so it's not from shared code.