On 2021-11-17, Skip Montanaro <skip.montan...@gmail.com> wrote: > Is the proliferation of packaging formats in Python as nutzo as this author > believes? > > https://drewdevault.com/2021/11/16/Python-stop-screwing-distros-over.html > > Asking because I've never been in the business of releasing "retail" Python > applications or packages.
Well the first paragraph is ridiculous. I've never heard of half of the things he lists as being necessary to deal with, and half the remainder are just words relating to packages, i.e. you could make a similar list for any language. The other major problem with that post is that it gives no examples or even clues as to what the author's actual problem is... On the other hand it is true that Python's packaging system is confusing and very badly documented, and I doubt the vast majority of people have any idea of what the difference between 'distutils' and 'setuptools' is (I certainly don't), except inasmuch as 'setuptools' (and 'wheel') is something you have to remember to manually update after creating a virtual environment before installing your actual packages. It's also true that you have to remember with Python that you basically cannot use 'pip' to install anything globally as it will interfere with the operating system's packaging. You must use virtual envs for everything, or the operating system's provided packages. Also PEP 518's choice of TOML is absolutely risible, a language about which the only positive thing can be said is that it's not as bad as YAML, and for which Python doesn't even have a built-in parser - something that should have absolutely ruled it out as an option. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
