Python Packaging Strategy Discussion - Part 1

Packaging
16

I have a lot of thoughts to share but I’ll do that separately[1]. Before that, I feel some urgency to say…

Everyone is thinking of different things when they see “unification” in this question – which is why this discussion is all over the place.[2] We ought to start by setting up shared vocabulary+understanding of what we’re even talking about in the context of unification.

I can see the following dimensions/aspects to the unification story:

  1. Unification of PyPI/conda models [3]
  2. Unification of the consumer-facing tooling[4]
  3. Unification of the publisher-facing tooling[5]
  4. Unification of the workflow setups/tooling[6]
  5. Unification/Consistency in the deployment processes[7]
  6. Unification/Consistency in “Python” installation/management experience[8]

Can anyone think of any other dimension/aspect contributing to the “tooling complexity” problem?

  1. Listen, at this point, I’ve been typing for the last 3 hours and I need to eat dinner now. That I moved to VS Code, after spending nearly 2 hours on discuss.python.org’s text editor, is a really good indicator that this isn’t the right medium for what I have written – so, I’ll put it up on my blog (with some polishing to make it readable without this thread). Sorry for the cliffhanger-ish opening sentence. :sweat_smile: ↩︎

  2. This sentence should have started with “I feel that”. I’ve omitted that since it’s more assertive this way. :stuck_out_tongue:
    Also, sorry, but it was a bit of a roller coaster reading the discussion so far. ↩︎

  3. i.e. the non-Python code dependency problem ↩︎

  4. i.e. consuming libraries ↩︎

  5. i.e. publishing libraries ↩︎

  6. i.e. organising files, running tests, linters, etc ↩︎

  7. i.e. going from source code → working application somewhere ↩︎

  8. i.e. the rustup/pyenv aspects of this, which is absolutely a thing that affects users’ “Python Packaging” experience (think pip != python -m pip, or python -m pip vs py -m pip, or python being on PATH but not pip etc) ↩︎

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