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A while back, I wrote some of my thoughts on Python packaging. I got excited seeing this title, but reading the article, I remain unconvinced. The whole thing i

A while back, I wrote some of my thoughts on Python packaging. I got excited seeing this title, but reading the article, I remain unconvinced. The whole thing is still way too confusing, and it's still not nearly as intuitive (or teachable) as "npm install ___".

ak217 10y ago
Most of the things you said in your writeup were no longer true in February 2015, and I think there are no concrete things that you wrote that are true anymore, thanks to the hard work of Python packaging infrastructure maintainers (https://github.com/pypa https://github.com/pypa). I find the griping a bit over the top. The point of the OP is that new exciting improvements have arrived in the Python packaging infrastructure. Yes, there were many ugly overwrought things in setuptools' past. Yes, npm has several great ideas. npm is also much younger than setuptools/PyPI, and I can cite lots of horror stories from its pre-io.js days too. But the volunteers who got us this far deserve to be recognized for the progress they've made. I think the biggest legitimate concern right now is how unintuitive it is to use pip in the presence of several Python runtimes/versions.
- hardmath123 10y ago
  Yeah, I'm sure things are better. And your typical developer will probably be just fine (I mean, we know they are because Python is so popular!). But for a beginner who is just trying to figure out how to share his or her code, it's still very confusing. And yes, part of that is definitely the fact that all of the mistakes of the past and their messy workarounds still show up in Google searches, muddying the waters; this obviously gives npm an edge. But even so, I feel that npm just does a better job when it comes to being learnable: people pick it up right away with very little trouble, and you can have your first "public-facing" module up on day one with very little effort. Indeed, in a way, the fact that it's so easy is what's giving it the most grief right now! So there are definitely lessons to be learned there, for everyone.
galacticpony 10y ago
"pip install ___" Everything else is pretty much obsolete. The problem is in how it doesn't really work reliably, especially with C extensions, which are much more common in Python-Land than with anything Javascript/NodeJS-related. You're also comparing with something that, by virtue of its age, has far less technical debt. Also, NPM is a "commercial product", PyPI is a community effort. Maybe the comparison to something like Anaconda would be more apt. The author acknowledges most problems anyway, he just comes to the wrong conclusion: It's not "good" now, it's still terrible, but everything else is more-or-less as bad or worse.

ak217 10y ago

Most of the things you said in your writeup were no longer true in February 2015, and I think there are no concrete things that you wrote that are true anymore, thanks to the hard work of Python packaging infrastructure maintainers (https://github.com/pypa https://github.com/pypa). I find the griping a bit over the top. The point of the OP is that new exciting improvements have arrived in the Python packaging infrastructure. Yes, there were many ugly overwrought things in setuptools' past. Yes, npm has several great ideas. npm is also much younger than setuptools/PyPI, and I can cite lots of horror stories from its pre-io.js days too. But the volunteers who got us this far deserve to be recognized for the progress they've made. I think the biggest legitimate concern right now is how unintuitive it is to use pip in the presence of several Python runtimes/versions.

hardmath123 10y ago
Yeah, I'm sure things are better. And your typical developer will probably be just fine (I mean, we know they are because Python is so popular!). But for a beginner who is just trying to figure out how to share his or her code, it's still very confusing. And yes, part of that is definitely the fact that all of the mistakes of the past and their messy workarounds still show up in Google searches, muddying the waters; this obviously gives npm an edge. But even so, I feel that npm just does a better job when it comes to being learnable: people pick it up right away with very little trouble, and you can have your first "public-facing" module up on day one with very little effort. Indeed, in a way, the fact that it's so easy is what's giving it the most grief right now! So there are definitely lessons to be learned there, for everyone.

galacticpony 10y ago

"pip install ___" Everything else is pretty much obsolete. The problem is in how it doesn't really work reliably, especially with C extensions, which are much more common in Python-Land than with anything Javascript/NodeJS-related. You're also comparing with something that, by virtue of its age, has far less technical debt. Also, NPM is a "commercial product", PyPI is a community effort. Maybe the comparison to something like Anaconda would be more apt. The author acknowledges most problems anyway, he just comes to the wrong conclusion: It's not "good" now, it's still terrible, but everything else is more-or-less as bad or worse.