On Monday, 27 May 2024 04:07:34 CEST Scott Kitterman wrote: > > While there are technical concerns on both sides, socially I think the > Python community isn't that interested in outside perspectives.
I managed to dig up these notes from the packaging summit at PyCon: https://hackmd.io/@pradyunsg/pycon2024-pack-summit Here's the summit page itself: https://us.pycon.org/2024/events/packaging-summit/ There is some fixation on the "system Python" in distributions, and the following remarks: "At least one distro team is working on moving their own Python out of the way, so users can install their own Python packages [...] Fedora tried platform-python and it broke everything, so it didn't really work" Given the proliferation of "virtual environments" around Python, where you just pick your own Python version and accompanying packages, I find it odd that the Python packaging community gets so hung up on the system Python. Do they want it to just go away or not be on the path or something? Wouldn't having a singular upstream Python just cause the same problems when someone finds that it isn't the version they need? For my own amusement and to confirm my own memories, I went back in time to check the Python Web site in the 1990s, and back then there was no problem in providing a binary for Linux and the Unix products of choice from that era. AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Irix, OSF/1, Solaris, and SunOS 4, plus a Linux binary supplied either as an RPM or in a plain archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20021030010019/http://www.python.org/ftp/python/ binaries-1.4/ What is stopping anyone from doing that all over again? The user downloads the binary, puts it in their current directory, and runs their software. Could it be that the burden of support is perhaps a little greater than one might expect? Because from that starting point, you have to build multiple versions, and then you have to build accompanying libraries, and then you have to support third-party packages which need third-party libraries. It wasn't a surprise that things like Sun Freeware (http://www.sunfreeware.com) emerged to cater to the proprietary platforms, whereas distributions emerged around Linux to manage this complexity and provide all this software. It is easy for the various language communities to focus only on their own ecosystems, but everybody's software has to work together. And then there are companies targeting various markets that demand software built on a selection of different technologies, so you get perspectives like these: "Why did the PyPI and Conda ecosystem get created? It was originally created as an educational teaching language. If all of your tools are in Python, all of the things in your ecosystem are supposed to work well together. However, the tools that scientists and data scientists use are very commonly written in C, C++, etc. and so there’s something called a “native binary problem”. Making this stuff compatible across the board is an incredibly challenging issue! Conda was created to resolve those binary compatibility issues." I honestly don't know what these people think operating system distributions are doing if not solving the "native binary problem". Paul
