In the past 12 hours, I started a new Python project. I can't agree with the sentiment - the most I can say is that Python packaging isn't terrible now. My int

In the past 12 hours, I started a new Python project. I can't agree with the sentiment - the most I can say is that Python packaging isn't terrible now. My intention was to create a Python 3 package using best-practices, a nice division of labour by process to avoid threading problems, etc. So far I've run into the following issues regarding packaging: Getting started - there's a glut of documentation, much of it contradictory, much of it out-of-date. Simply google "Python packaging" and you'll have to pick between 4 sources of info on the first page, all of which look official. The tools - this one was a new one for me; I normally use virtualenvs for development, but vaguely remembered it being bundled in Python 3. Turns out it's not virtualenv but "pyvenv". Beyond the confusion of the name change, there's also a tool called "pyenv" muddying the waters. The specifics - I started with https://packaging.python.org/ https://packaging.python.org/ and was struck by how ambiguous the instructions were. Doing something as simple as declaring your package's version has 7 different options: https://packaging.python.org/single_source_version/ https://packaging.python.org/single_source_version/. In the end, I got the most help from reading the guide's sample project... I only have to wonder about the licensing implications of that. The infrastructure - because I was creating a project with multiple executables, I needed a way to start one from the other. Despite knowing that setuptools is responsible for generating the executables, I quickly found that there's just no way to find those executable paths programmatically. Library choice - I needed an inotify library. I searched for "inotify", "notify" and "watch" on Pypi but had little way of distinguishing the results - the "weight" column is useless as compared to a rating system or even download count. Thankfully, I remembered about awesome-python.com which bridges the gap. All told, it took me several hours to bootstrap the project, not even including things like testing. I'd say Python packaging has a way to go before I'd call it "good".