On 18.03.2021 15:33, Steve Dower wrote:
On 18Mar2021 1026, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
By having an automated infrastructure which can deal with handling the compilation step, we make things easier for C extension developers across the board and without having to restrict the C API to result in a stable ABI.
Personally, I think that we should all switch over to the conda infrastructure to get us there quickly. Others will disagree, of course, and rather continue reinventing wheels :-) That's fair.
By "conda infrastructure" I assume you mean conda-forge? >
Yes. Plus the commercial offering by Anaconda for packages which are not open source or have special needs.
So essentially standardise extension module (and package) building across the ecosystem, and establish a community that helps maintain this *apart* from the original package developers?
conda-forge is already well-maintained and supported by NumFocus. It solves a lot of the problems pip and PyPI set out to solve and, among other things, takes care of the build process.
I'm not totally against this, FWIW, I just think it's unlikely that we'd get it to work (at least with the blessing of the upstream package developers, who always seem to insist on being in full control of their packages).
I would love to be convinced it could be done though :) What would it take? Am I just being too pessimistic?
I guess the key argument here is that the build process and the packages themselves are (often) maintained by two different sets of people - much like what happens with Linux distribution packages.
The authors of the packages no longer have to deal with the packaging or the build process, taking away a lot of the pain.
conda uses PyPI as fallback in case the packages don't exist in conda-forge, so there's a nice transition path.
And what's even better: you can even host your C lib dependencies on conda-forge as well, since the package format is not tied to Python.
How to get there ? Well, let the users decide... right now, conda is marketed mostly in the data science space. If this were to be made more visible outside this space, a lot more people would start using it and eventually migrate to it.
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