On 21 May 2015 at 08:46, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 21 May 2015 at 03:37, Chris Barker <chris.bar...@noaa.gov> wrote: >> As such, it _could_ play the role that pip+wheel (secondarily pypi) play in >> the python ecosystem. > > In practice, it can't, as conda is entirely inappropriate as an input > format for yum/apt/enstaller/zc.buildout/pypm/MSI/etc. In many ways, > the barriers that keep conda from being a viable competitor to pip > from an upstream perspective are akin to those that felled the > distutils2 project, while the compatible-with-the-existing-ecosystem > d2to1 has seen far more success.
I think I've finally figured out a short way of describing these "packaging ideas that simply won't work": if an ecosystem-wide packaging proposal doesn't work for entirely unmaintained PyPI packages, it's likely a bad proposal. This was not only the fatal flaw in the previous distribute/distutils2 approach, it's the reason we introduced so much additional complexity into PEP 440 in order to preserve compatibility with the vast majority of existing package versions on PyPI (over 98% of existing version numbers were still accepted), it's one of the key benefits of separating the PyPI-to-end-user TUF PEP from the dev-to-end-user one, and it's the reason why the "Impact assessment" section is one of the most important parts of the proposal in PEP 470 to migrate away from offering the current link spidering functionality (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0470/#id13). Coping with this problem is also why injecting setuptools when running vanilla distutils projects is one of the secrets of pip's success: by upgrading setuptools, and by tweaking the way pip invokes setup.py with it injected, we can change the way packages are built and installed *without* needing to change the packages themselves. Regards, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
