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by slavoingilizov 2214 days ago
The missing ingredient to really, REALLY solve these problems once and for all is an authoritative decision to switch package formats and run the whole dependency resolution stack by the core python language contributor team.

I get backwards compatibility and open-source governance and bla-bla, but the reality is that this cannot be done by a third-party library author and needs to become part of the core stack, including proper support rather than just shipping a tool which covers 90% of cases. It's crazy that apart from venv and pip, nothing else comes with python and you're left on your own.

npm + the registry is part of node

apt-get + registry is part of a normal linux distro

budnler comes with ruby

This is a solved problem elsewhere. What we lack is a fully-supported, agreed upon, working DEFAULT choice, so people don't have to make their own choices. I don't know if not having that DEFAULT is a function of how the python community thinks or its diversity, but it's painful to watch. I've almost given up myself and seen many newcomers give up because of a trivial problem like this.

2 comments

While npm comes with node, and bundler comes with Ruby, the governance of these projects/tools are separate from the language.
Yet someone has made the decision to do bundle them with the language and provide a default. I'm not suggesting we have common governance, but these decisions need to be made.
The default is pip + python3 -m venv.
Then I guess they are not good enough?! I use them (without other tools) and I'm happy, but do fairly simple python development. There's a reason many people choose other tools if these don't cover common cases.