Pulling the plug: pypi.bartbroe.re

Yesterday the Github Action that updates pypi.bartbroe.re broke down. This was a personal project that scraped Christoph Gohlke’s collection of Python Windows wheels, and created a package index for it that could be used with pip. When I tried to find out why it broke down, it turned out the original page at https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ is no longer there. Looking at the latest snapshot of the page in the Internet Archive this project turned out to be discontinued as well.

Over the years this package index had at least one happy user: me. Whenever I encountered difficulties with building or installing wheels on Windows, it provided a solution. However, the good news is that the Windows wheels on the official PyPI have significantly improved since then. This improvement may be one of the reasons why the site I scraped has been discontinued. Many thanks to Christoph Gohlke who did most of the actual hard work maintaining the actual wheels over the years.

Considering all this, I decided it’s time to sunset my PyPI registry along with the page it scraped. For the time being I’ll keep it online, but I discourage using it.