conda distribution

[analog-cbarber]

Would be nice if this package was available in a conda/anaconda distribution, preferably from the conda-forge channel.

[altendky]

That certainly sounds good, but it is unlikely that I will get to it. I don't know much about anaconda and have a bunch of other tasks piled up.

[bluebird75]

I checked a bit anacondia. The PyQt version distributed there is really old. I seriously doubt that this is a significant distribution channel. So, added with the fact that I am not familiar with the conda / anaconda ecosystem, this makes it unlikely for me to get involved.

[analog-cbarber]

conda-forge is a significant distribution channel for non-commercial users of PyQt, but is only supported by volunteers which is why it is out of date.

But installation using pip is better than nothing.

[altendky]

Note that PyQt non-commercial itself is available in compiled form via pip and has been for awhile. While anaconda certainly still has uses, one of its historical high points of being a unique place to get lots of precompiled Python packages is no longer particularly unique since most projects provide wheels on PyPI.

[analog-cbarber]

The issue is that pip/pypi is not really a replacement for conda. PyPi packages are not always compatible with conda packages and installing via pip into a conda environment can result in the installation of incompatible binaries resulting in crashes. Furthermore, conda packages cannot declare dependencies on pip packages (because it is an entirely separate packaging system), so using pip packages requires some special post-install steps.

Pypi is much older than anconda.org. The advantage of anaconda over pip/pypi is that it is not restricted to just python packages. This is a big reason why people use it and will continue to use it regardless of what wheels are available on pypi.

It is totally understandable if no one finds the time for this, but no one publishing packages on pypi should fool themselves into thinking that conda users will be totally happy with a pip-only solution, especially for packages that are a runtime dependency.

In this case, the stubs are mostly useful for development and testing environments, so it isn't so bad that you can only get it from pip.

[altendky]

Certainly a conda package would be nice. As I said, binaries are not the only reason it is useful.

Out of curiosity, is conda/anaconda looking into automatic repackaging of wheels from PyPI? It seems like there might be a way to usefully just mirror the whole thing.

[analog-cbarber]

The standard anaconda channels are managed by anaconda. I am not sure what they do, but conda-forge is community managed.

It seems like the easiest way to publish PyQt would be to repackage already compiled wheels, but it appears that the current approach on the conda-forge feedstock is to build from scratch, which is probably why it is stuck at 5.12.

[hoechenberger]

Hello, I've created a conda-forge package pyqt-stubs; the feedstock repository can be found at https://github.com/conda-forge/pyqt-stubs-feedstock

If anyone would like to co-maintain the feedstock, please let me know.