Pip UX studies: Test pip's new resolver and help us document dependency conflicts

Packaging
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It’s Bernard and Nicole from the pip Team.

The team is working on the improving the way that pip resolves package dependency conflicts. We’re asking for your help to test pip’s new resolver.

We’re especially interested in hearing from people who have projects with complex dependencies.

By complex dependencies we mean projects that look like this:

  • have at least 10 package dependencies
  • some package are pinned to specific versions
  • that you always have a dependency issue when installing it
  • you have to put in hacks, workarounds, or fixes

Currently, we’re trying to discover all the ways in which pip‘s dependency resolver fails, so that we can work out what error messages and/or debugging information we should display.

You can find out what we’d like you to do on this blogpost:

http://www.ei8fdb.org/thoughts/2020/05/test-pips-alpha-resolver-and-help-us-document-dependency-conflicts/

You can sign-up for other UX Studies also:
http://www.ei8fdb.org/thoughts/2020/03/pip-ux-study-recruitment/

If you’ve got any questions, let me know.

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(Added separately due to new user restrictions)

If you’re into social media, we’d appreciate if you’d boost these messages too:


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Could you please add a note about the following environment variable to your article?

PIP_UNSTABLE_FEATURE=resolver

I’m not sure if that’s obvious for other pip users but personally I’ve just found out about it from another thread here. It would be useful if one wants to switch to the new resolver completely as perse need not to type the long argument --unstable-feature=resolver.

1 Like
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Hi @McSinyx,

Yes of course I can add that - can I ask where would be the best place to add it? In point 2?

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Thanks, point 2 seems to be a suitable place for it.

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I can’t actually access that page: “An error occurred during a connection to www.ei8fdb.org. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR”.

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Hi Brett,
Hmm, that error seems to be related to not being able to make a secure connection to a site. I’ve not got SSL setup on www.ei8fdb.org yet. Can I suggest you make a non-SSL connection to the site in the short term? Alternatively I can paste the content of the post here.

EDIT: I’ve just checked and my hosting company has implemented a simpler process (previously it was much more involved) to install an SSL cert. I’ve created a new cert so it should be live very soon and so you should not get that error message.