[announce] Pybi and Posy

Packaging Announcements
11

I’m happy to see this Posy get publicly announced![1]

This might just be my mental mindset at the moment, but I can’t shake the feeling that this is xkcd: Standards but across two dimensions; a new alternative to the workflow tooling we have today as well as to how Python is distributed.

Like, GitHub - David-OConnor/pyflow: An installation and dependency system for Python is also a written-in-Rust-and-manages-Python-install tool which makes a bunch of different design choices which made it less portable/reusable AFAICT than this would eventually be (PEP 582 for the virtual-environment-alternative, Posy seems to be inventing its own scheme based off of paths in an env-var; it uses some form of dependency cache while Posy does a proper resolve etc)[2].

The PyBI-based model for managing Python installations functionally proposes that we should either (a) completely change how Python is distributed by core devs, or (b) add yet-another-way to get Python that is, at least initially, workflow-tool specific. The former is a huge community-wide initiative, that we’d want to get buy-in on from CPython core. The latter is definitionally yet-another-way unless we do something to avoid that issue.

If we take away PyBI and Python management for a moment (eg: like enabling it to work with any pre-existing Python installation while being a single non-Python binary would), I can’t help but view it as an alternative to all the Python-based workflow tools we have today (Poetry’s auto-managed venv, PDM’s “PEP 582” management, similarity to Hatch’s environments is explicitly mentioned, etc). There’s different design tradeoffs to this model compared to those but, as it stands, it is fundamentally an alternative.

Am I missing something that alleviates this?

FWIW, please don’t conflate my caution with opposition or as an attempt to tone down others’ enthusiasm – if the idea is that we all want to lean into this, I’m on board.[3] I’m mainly wary of a one-more-choice situation and that is coming from a more broad view that isn’t specific to this announcement/tool. Besides, there are lots of things that I like about this model.[4]

  1. I knew about this effort prior to this announcement. :stuck_out_tongue: ↩︎

  2. I might be wrong – this is based on a very surface level understanding of both tools/models. ↩︎

  3. I’m very uncertain about how my words/actions will be interpreted; given Should PEP 704 be a PEP? - #7 by pradyunsg ↩︎

  4. I trust that @njs knows this. :slight_smile: ↩︎

8 Likes