Roadmap

now maintained on https://github.com/winpython/winpython/wiki/Roadmap

Legacy version:

My first post related to WinPython on Spyder's blog is worth reading to understand a few things regarding the original motivation and some facts on building 64-bit Python packages on Windows -- it's entitled: "Scientific Python distribution for Windows 64bit".

After creating the Python(x,y) distribution which is still a great success in the scientific Python ecosystem, I wanted to try another way of distributing Python for Windows through a portable distribution which would rely on official packages only (i.e. libraries built by their own maintainer) instead of having to rebuild every single package like it's done with Python(x,y).

A portable distribution means that it's all in a single, self-consistent folder which is movable to any location without any installation procedure: in other words, copying is installing. To make it work, configuration scripts must be executed before the Python interpreter itself is started, setting up the right environment for its execution.

As a consequence, multiple versions of WinPython (with arbitrary versions or architectures of Python) may be used on the same machine without any specific configuration. In August 2012, when I decided to launch the project, this was the strongest motivation of all: being able to use as many Python distributions as I need on any machine, in a 5 minutes top (just the time to unzip a 200-300MB archive), thus allowing to test scripts with Python 2.7 or 3.3, 32 or 64bit.

Ultimately, this will allow me to keep with me on a USB key my whole development framework: a working Python/Spyder environment, TortoiseHg and other development tools and all my projects. Note that it will also require a redirection of user settings environment variable %USERPROFILE%[1] and a new feature in Spyder (being able to set the workspace directory location to a relative path[2]).

[1] I'm still not sure about this. For example, when working on the same machine for a time being, this maybe annoying to loose settings everytime you switch from a distribution to another: in this situation, the single settings folder in user's home directory would probably be more comfortable.

[2] Since this changeset, this is handled by the executable launchers of Spyder in WinPython.