What to do when Gohlke's python wheel service shuts down? [closed]
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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:

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?

Uredo answered 11/6, 2022 at 3:51 Comment(5)
Although I think your question is of great importance to the community, it's not strictly a StackOverflow question - I do feel it deserves some attention. There are of course other ways to get your packages. Using something like conda (I particularly like miniconda) gets around it, but comes with baggage. Other than options like that, you already have the answer there: someone will need to be willing to share a service they provided to their colleagues to the rest of the world and put the work in of compiling library binaries for various platforms - not really "Python"'s problemInquisitor
Someone has put up a mirror of his wheels here, but presumably will not be building new ones. I'm extremely confused by this whole situation because there's nothing on the LFD web site about a shutdown. There's a list of upcoming events including the Feb. 2023 meeting of the Biophysical Society at which the LFD will have an exhibitor booth. Were they just suddenly told they had lost funding effective almost immediately?Pale
The edit turned the question into a request for an off-site resource, which is still off-topic for Stack Overflow. Consider hosting this concern in another venue if you haven't yet.Insolvable
Discussion continues on this Reddit thread.Acropetal
I found that Christoph Gohlke now has this github repo where he apparently still regularly releases new wheels. Unfortunately the numpy+mkl wheel is not there though.Assembler

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