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Sigh. I deeply appreciate the work that Michał does. This post signals a bunch of work that I will have to do in the future to mitigate the eternal churn in the
by tgbugs 5y ago
Sigh. I deeply appreciate the work that Michał does. This post signals a bunch of work that I will have to do in the future to mitigate the eternal churn in the python ecosystem.
> all the breakage is dumped on distribution packagers.
This line sums it up for me. It is the fundamental disrespect for other peoples' time, and the lack of any attempt to maintain backward compatibility that goes along with it that have convinced me that the whole mindset around python is not suitable for any project that needs stability.
For example, I foresee a future where the academic python codebases that happen to have avoided the superfund site of jupyter notebooks will be broken and useless within a decade because no one will be able to install them and use or reuse them due to some as yet unforeseen change from upstream. The maintenance overhead of using python is absurdly high, to the point where it seems that every single project has to have an active maintainer otherwise it rapidly becomes completely useless.
Maybe it will get better, but it would require a significant shift in community priorities.
edit: Oh, don't miss the circular dependency introduced by tomli. You can just curl it onto your system right?
edit2: No more data_files? Wow. That's a disaster.
- richardwhiuk 5y agoWhy should the Python developers care about how difficult it is for Gentoo? You are basically asking open source maintainers to do a bunch of work for distribution maintainers for no reward. Linux distributions of Python are horrifically broken. If you ever use the system pip, you can only break things in horrible ways.
- tgbugs 5y agoThey should care because their behavior is a strong negative signal that they don't care about supporting existing users and taking responsibility for code that they have written and supported in the past and because it will ultimately cost them users and contributors. From a technical standpoint if there is existing functionality that is widely used and even if it is deprecated it should not simply be removed. Deprecation means that no new projects should make use of that functionality. Actively removing functionality without providing a path forward that supports the same features is a sign of an immature engineering culture. Gentoo patches system pip to ensure that users don't fubar their systems. Some distros do actually know what they are doing, sometimes better than upstream. I would argue that distro python is so often broken precisely because the core solutions for python packaging are immature to say the least, and entirely deficient and poorly thought out to say the worst. This is likely largely due to the reliance on virtual environments which are the ultimate non-solution and allow the real problems to fester without a solution.
- wombatpm 5y agoAnymore, I leave system python alone and build from source. I got tired of the fight
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]