In one of my visits on Christoph Gohlke's website "Unofficial Windows Binaries for Python Extension Packages" I just found terrifying news at the very top of the page:
Funding for the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics has ceased. This service will be discontinued before July 2022.
This is not just a random change that could break someone's workflow, it is rather a immensely fragile dependency issue. It feels like an absolute desaster in the light of millions of python users and developers worldwide who rely on those precompiled python wheels. Just a few numbers to illustrate the potential catastrophe that is on the horizon when Christoph shuts down his service:
- a simple backlink check reveals ~83k referal links from ~5k unique domains, out of which many prominent and official websites appear in the top 100, such as cython.org, scipy.org, or famous package providers like Shapely, GeoPandas, Cartopy, Fiona, or GDAL (by O'Reilly).
- Another perspective provides the high number of related search results, votes, and views on StackOverflow, which clearly indicates the vast amount of installation issues haunting the python community and how often Christoph's unofficial website is the key to solve them.
How should the community move from here?
- As so many packages and users rely on this service, how can we keep the python ecosystem and user community alive without it? (Not to speak of my own packages, of which I don't know how to make them available for Windows users in the future.)
- Is there hope for other people to be nearly as altruistic and gracious as Christoph has been in all these years to host python wheels on their private website?
- Should we move away from wheels and rather clutter up our environment with whole new ecosystems, such as GDAL for Windows or OSGeo4W?
- Or is there any chance that Python will reach a point in the current decade that allows users and developers to smoothly distribute and install any package on any system without hassle?
EDIT: I was asked to reformulate the question to be more concrete: What is the best source of thoroughly hosted pre-compiled wheel files other than Gohlke's website?