> I didn't put binary support into pip because (a) it didn't work well on some systems, and (b) I didn't use the other systems. I am not aware of rejected patch

> I didn't put binary support into pip because (a) it didn't work well on some systems, and (b) I didn't use the other systems. I am not aware of rejected patches to support binary packages on Windows (where it would be nice to include), or even rejected patches on other systems (where I think it would be misguided). I did not even manage to come up with a patch that adds binary support. I looked into it one or two months ago and the way pip finds and installs packages is very different from how easy_install does it. It looked like too big of a task for me to do in the time I allocated for it. Until two months ago I did not care at all about binary distributions. It never was an issue for me. Suddenly a requirement change and I was presented with a problem that turned out to be tricky to fix with pip but easy as pie with easy_install. This is not a criticism on either pip or you as a person, just an observation of how easy it is to miss something because it does not fit ones personal requirements. I certainly did not care about binary eggs until I had to deploy code to more than one machine and wanted to have the ability to quickly switch between releases. > And admittedly the code is hairy too – but who wants to fix that? I don't! No one does! Yes. And now it's getting replaced with a new system and I hope that's not going to make the same mistakes. I certainly don't feel like I'm up to the task of making a replacement for distutils/setuptools.