Wanting a singular packaging tool/vision

[ncoghlan (Alyssa Coghlan)]

@dstufft

It’s actually kind of wild the sheer breadth of use cases that the current tooling is expected to handle, and I’m not sure that any one person even knows all of them. Trying to enumerate them all would be a pretty huge undertaking but if someone were to do that, would be pretty useful I think.

Historical tangent: I was checking if I had ever written such a thing (spoiler: I kind of did) and noticed that we’re about to hit the 10 year anniversary of my writing Incremental Plans to Improve Python Packaging — Nick Coghlan's Python Notes 1.0 documentation

We’ve come a long way from that initial incremental goal of “‘./setup.py install’ must die”

The “kind of” use case enumerations that I put together were:

• one for CPython that is indirectly also one for the Python packaging ecosystem: Considering Python's Target Audience | Curious Efficiency
• an earlier one regarding the different positions that pip and conda occupy in the packaging ecosystem design space: The Python Packaging Ecosystem | Curious Efficiency
• a review of various programming languages that may provide insight into different aspects of Python and its ecosystem: 27 languages to improve your Python | Curious Efficiency

Folks won’t find new answers in any of those, but the framing may still be useful (especially for folks just starting to explore the problem space)

(Edited to add the 3rd article reference - I initially forgot about the use cases mentioned at the end of each section in the “27 languages…” article)