Developing a single tool for building/developing projects

[njs (Nathaniel J. Smith)]

@uranusjr

a command that knows when to do what (and when not to) before running the actual command, like how you’d use go run or cargo run instead of executing the built binary manually. And that command would go into the hypothecal tool that contains those other commands we don’t want to stuff into pip .

I think this kind of “all-in-one python developer workflow” tool is definitely a productive direction to go in. (I think this is what @dholth dubbed “the platypus”?) I think it would be awesome if someone would take this seriously. I volunteer to beta test :-).

@uranusjr

Using pip install directly for this would most definitely be unacceptably slow, but that wouldn’t be necessary

This is reminding me of this previous discussion:

@njs

Hmm, so here’s a potentially interesting feature for a future version of editable installs. This suggests editable installs are really just a optimization to make reinstalling really fast, and they sacrifice some accuracy to do that. Maybe we can make them a faster or more accurate optimization. For example, what if the backend could provide some extra metadata to hint to the frontend when a rebuild is required ("if any of these files change, do a full reinstall: setup.py , lib/foo.c , …). Then a pipenv-like tool could stay fast when only .py files are updated, but also take on some of the cache consistency tracking that we currently have to do in our heads.