[wiredfool]

Pillow has most of the issues that are listed in the article. (oddly enough for a graphics library, the GPU part is the only part that I don't think we've stumbled over at one point or another.)

From a quality of life issue -- having the sdist install behind an opt-in flag by default for our package would be great. Unless you're a developer with a lot of -dev packages for imaging libraries already on your system, you're not going to be able to build from source. And even if the error that pops up is along the lines of

  The headers or library files could not be found for {str(err)},
  a required dependency when compiling Pillow from source.
  Please see the install instructions at:
    https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html

We still get people posting issues about pillow failing to install.

Build farms would be nice. We've burned tons of time on it between travis and GH actions and @cgohlke single handedly making all of the windows builds for the entire scientific python community.

Ultimately, something like the debian packaging system is probably the best open source model for this. (though the splitting of the python standard library so that virtual envs aren't in the base install is a pita). Unstable gets a reasonably current set of packages, and crucially all of the underlying library dependencies are compiled together. It's also not _that_ hard to rebuild individual packages from source, in an automated fashion. (This may be what Conda is doing, but I've never looked in detail at their system)

[david2ndaccount]

Could you release the sdist as a separate package and only upload binary wheels for a normal install?

[uranusjr]

You could, and that’s what psycopg2 did for a while (for a different reason but effectively they separated source and binary releases as different projects). This solves an immediate problem but introduces new challenges, probably the most significant being Python does not allow OR dependencies (I want at least one of those) and splitting the package made dependant projects’ lives miserable.