3 ms·

For those of us out of the loop: what debacle with pipenv?

photon-torpedo 4y ago
Perhaps see this past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18612590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18612590
- shantnutiwari 4y ago
  that doesnt explain anything -- pipenv was broken? So? Its an open source project, it will have issues now and then.
  - cpdean 4y ago
    For me the issue was less about the bugs in pipenv, and more about how Kenneth Reitz leveraged his commit rights to other projects' documentation to update them to claim that they all recommended pipenv when pipenv was in its infancy.
  - smcl 4y ago
    Sounds like it was a bit more than that, the top comment there looks quite damning: >However, Kenneth abused his position with PyPA (and quickly bumped a what is a beta product to version 18) to imply Pipenv was more stable, more supported and more official than it really was. > And worse still, for anyone saying "but ts open source, you get what you pay for", Kenneth as former Python Overlord at Heroku, encouraged Heroku to place Pipenv above Pip as the default Python package manager in the Python buildpack. This decision impacted paying customers and the Python buildpack used a broken version of Pipenv for a long time. So long, most people I know just went back to Pip. > Then, lastly, when people complained he had a tizzy at reddit and twitter and got PyPA to help backtrack and say "no we didn't support it, nope, its just a thing that happened", all while the main Pipenv Github repository was held under the PyPA GitHub Org.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
Basically, Reitz marketed pipenv as _the_ package management tool recommended by Python, by which he meant PyPA, which he was on the board of at the time. This was displayed prominently on on the front page of the pipenv docs. After push back, that claim was amended to _the_ package tool recommended by PyPA, not Python. Then shit blew up on /r/python and someone else from PyPA stepped in to clarify that pipenv was _a_ package tool recommended by PyPA. And then there was a lot of angry reddit comments, and blog posts. https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8jd6aq/why_is_pipenv_the_recommended_packaging_tool_by/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8jd6aq/why_is_pipen... https://web.archive.org/web/20180519001601/http://journal.kennethreitz.org/entry/r-python https://web.archive.org/web/20180519001601/http://journal.ke... I wasn't really up to date with Python community drama, but when I had to write a new app in Python, I went looking for something better than pip and a requirements.txt and I chose pipenv, because shit, it was the recommended package management tool for Python, right? Then I found that pipenv really sucked in many magical and horrible ways, and then the drama about that alleged recommendation broke out. Anyway, basically, Reitz made claims about pipenv that weren't exactly outright fabrications, but they were very much distorting the truth, people called him on it, he blogged, and then the uptake of pipenv dropped dramatically and people started to realise Poetry was far better. One issue I experienced was that pipenv would choke and die on dependency graphs that Poetry found to be super easy, barely an inconvenience. Oh and upgrading Python or pipenv was risky AF because of how closely coupled pipenv was to pip code.

Perhaps see this past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18612590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18612590

shantnutiwari 4y ago
that doesnt explain anything -- pipenv was broken? So? Its an open source project, it will have issues now and then.
- cpdean 4y ago
  For me the issue was less about the bugs in pipenv, and more about how Kenneth Reitz leveraged his commit rights to other projects' documentation to update them to claim that they all recommended pipenv when pipenv was in its infancy.
- smcl 4y ago
  Sounds like it was a bit more than that, the top comment there looks quite damning: >However, Kenneth abused his position with PyPA (and quickly bumped a what is a beta product to version 18) to imply Pipenv was more stable, more supported and more official than it really was. > And worse still, for anyone saying "but ts open source, you get what you pay for", Kenneth as former Python Overlord at Heroku, encouraged Heroku to place Pipenv above Pip as the default Python package manager in the Python buildpack. This decision impacted paying customers and the Python buildpack used a broken version of Pipenv for a long time. So long, most people I know just went back to Pip. > Then, lastly, when people complained he had a tizzy at reddit and twitter and got PyPA to help backtrack and say "no we didn't support it, nope, its just a thing that happened", all while the main Pipenv Github repository was held under the PyPA GitHub Org.

EdwardDiego 4y ago

Basically, Reitz marketed pipenv as _the_ package management tool recommended by Python, by which he meant PyPA, which he was on the board of at the time. This was displayed prominently on on the front page of the pipenv docs. After push back, that claim was amended to _the_ package tool recommended by PyPA, not Python. Then shit blew up on /r/python and someone else from PyPA stepped in to clarify that pipenv was _a_ package tool recommended by PyPA. And then there was a lot of angry reddit comments, and blog posts. https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8jd6aq/why_is_pipenv_the_recommended_packaging_tool_by/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8jd6aq/why_is_pipen... https://web.archive.org/web/20180519001601/http://journal.kennethreitz.org/entry/r-python https://web.archive.org/web/20180519001601/http://journal.ke... I wasn't really up to date with Python community drama, but when I had to write a new app in Python, I went looking for something better than pip and a requirements.txt and I chose pipenv, because shit, it was the recommended package management tool for Python, right? Then I found that pipenv really sucked in many magical and horrible ways, and then the drama about that alleged recommendation broke out. Anyway, basically, Reitz made claims about pipenv that weren't exactly outright fabrications, but they were very much distorting the truth, people called him on it, he blogged, and then the uptake of pipenv dropped dramatically and people started to realise Poetry was far better. One issue I experienced was that pipenv would choke and die on dependency graphs that Poetry found to be super easy, barely an inconvenience. Oh and upgrading Python or pipenv was risky AF because of how closely coupled pipenv was to pip code.