[vonseel]

Today I was preparing a minimal project for something I needed to share with someone else. I wasn’t sure what tools they would already have installed, so I checked out Python’s official packaging docs and browsed around.

One page defaulted to giving instructions by default using “hatch”, while another page says the official recommendation is setuptools with a setup.cfg and only dynamic things declared in setup.py. Meanwhile, pyproject.toml support is being pushed elsewhere and in beta support for a lot of setup tools features.

There’s way too many tools and too much confusion around which ones to use and which ones are the best to choose going forward. Why can’t we just be like Rust and have one tool that builds and formats and runs tests and everything else?

Pipenv is crap but it’s somehow gained support of the PyCQA, meanwhile I’m not sure if poetry is even mentioned by the Python docs or CQA but it’s the one I’ve been using and it seems great, but I don’t even know if I’ve made the right choice anymore by using that.

All of this fragmentation just leads to developer confusion, newbies and people who have been using the language 10+ years alike.