Mailman 3 February 2020 - Distutils-SIG

Improving Communication
by Donald Stufft July 30, 2020

July 30, 2020

Currently in the packaging space, we have a number of avenues for communication, which are: - distutils-sig - pypa-dev - virtualenv-users - Other project specific mailing lists - IRC - gitter - Various issue trackers spread across multiple platforms. - Probably more places I’m not remembering. The result of this is that all discussion ends up being super fractured amongst the various places. Sometimes that is exactly what you want (for instance, someone who is working on the wheel specs probably doesn’t care about deprecation policy and internal module renaming in pip) and sometimes that ends up being the opposite of what you want (for instance, when you’re describing something that touches PyPI, setuptools, flit, pip, etc all at once). Theoretically the idea is that distutils-sig is where cross project reaching stuff goes, IRC/gitter is where real time discussion goes, and the various project mailing lists and issue trackers are where the project specific bits go. The problem is that often times doesn’t actually happen in practice except for the largest and most obvious of changes. I think our current “communications stack” kind of sucks, and I’d love to figure out a better way for us to handle this that solves the sort of weird “independent but related” set of projects we have here. From my POV, a list of our major problems are: * Discussion gets fractured across a variety of platforms and locations, which can make it difficult to actually keep up with what’s going on but also to know how to loop in someone relevant if their input would be valuable. You have to more or less simultaneously know someone’s email, Github username, IRC nick, bitbucket username, etc to be able to bring threads of discussion to people’s attention. * It’s not always clear to users where a discussion should go, often times they’ll come to one location and need to get redirected to another location. If any discussion did happen in the incorrect location, it tends to need to get restarted in the new location (and depending on the specific platform, it may be impossible to actually redirect everyone over to the proper location, so you again, end up fractured with the discussion happening in two places). * A lot of the technology in this stack is particularly old, and lacks a lot of the modern day affordances that newer things have. An example is being able to edit a discussion post to fix typos that can hinder the ability of others to actually understand whats being talked about. In your typical mailing list or IRC there’s no mechanism by which you can edit an already sent message, so your only option is to either let the problem ride and hope it doesn’t trip up too many people, or send an additional message to correct the error. However these show up as additional, later messages which someone might not even see until they’ve already been thoroughly confused by the first message (since people tend to read email/IRC in a linear fashion). - There is a lot of things in this one, other things are things like being able to control in a more fine grained manner what email you’re going to get. - Holy crap, formatting and typography to make things actually readable and not a big block of plaintext. * We don’t have a clear way for users to get help, leaving users to treat random issues, discussion areas, etc as a support forum, rather than some place that’s actually optimized for that. Some of this ties back into some of the earlier things too, where it’s hard to actually redirect discussions These aren’t *new* problems, and often times the existing members of a community are the least effected becasue they’ve already spent effort learning the ins and outs and also curating a (typically custom) workflow that they’ve grown accustomed too. The problem with that is that often times that means that new users are left out, and the community gets smaller and smaller as time goes on as people leave and aren’t replaced with new blood, because they’re driven off but the issues with the stack. A big part of the place this is coming from, is me sitting back and realizing that I tend to be drawn towards pulling discussions into Github issues rather than onto the varying mailing lists, not because that’s always the most appropriate place for it, but because it’s the least painful place in terms of features and functionality. I figure if I’m doing that, when I already have a significant investment in setting up tooling and being involved here, that others (and particularly new users) are likely feeling the same way. - Donald

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FASTEN and dependency analysis at call graph level
by Sumana Harihareswara July 16, 2020

July 16, 2020

Last week I heard for the first time about the research project FASTEN https://www.fasten-project.eu/. "FASTEN stands for Fine-Grained Analysis of Software Ecosystems as Networks." > instead of analyzing dependencies at the package level, we will analyze them at the call graph level! This will allow us to be super precise when we are tracking dependencies, when we do change impact analysis, when we recommend clients to update packages etc. It will also open the door to new sophisticated applications, e.g. licensing compliance, dependency risk profiling and data-driven API evolution. That's from the blog post by Georgios Gousios, the PI, at http://www.gousios.gr/blog/Introducing-Fasten.html . More info: https://www.fasten-project.eu/view/Main/Introduction https://www.fasten-project.eu/view/Main/Overview https://www.fasten-project.eu/view/Main/Contacts And people who are interested in dynamically and statically analyzing call graphs in Python may be interested in "Graph Schema and its representation" in https://www.fasten-project.eu/view/Main/Deliverables . I've sent a note to FASTEN inviting the team to come talk about their project here on distutils-sig, because FASTEN's site says they aim to eventually integrate into PyPI -- I'm not 100% sure whether that means "create a service that people can use WITH PyPI" or "get FASTEN's work incorporated into pypi.org". -- Sumana Harihareswara pip project manager on contract with Python Software Foundation Changeset Consulting https://changeset.nyc

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PyPi not allowing duplicate filenames
by Chris Barker April 20, 2020

April 20, 2020

Hi all, PyPi does not allow duplicate file names -- this makes lots of sense, because you really don't want people to go to PyPi one day and grab a file, and then go there another day, grab a file with exactly the same name, and have it be a different file. However.... We are all too human, and make mistakes when doing a release. All to often someone pushed a broken file up to PyPi, often realizes it pretty quickly -- before anyone has a chance to even download it (or only the dev team as, for testing...). In fact, I was in a sprint last summer, and we decided to push our package up to PyPi -- granted, we were all careless amateurish noobs, but we ended up making I think 4! minor version bumps because we had done something stupid in the sdist. Also -- the latest numpy release got caught in this, too: """ * We ran into a problem with pipy not allowing reuse of filenames and a resulting proliferation of *.*.*.postN releases. Not only were the names getting out of hand, some packages were unable to work with the postN suffix. """ So -- I propose that PyPi allow projects to replace existing files if they REALLY REALLY want to. You should have to jump through all sorts of hoops, and make it really clear that it is a BAD IDEA in the general case, but it'd be good to have it be possible. After all -- PyPi does not take on responsibility for anything else about what's in those packages, and Python itself is all about "we're all consenting adults here" I suppose we could even put in some heuristics about how long the file as been there, how many times it's been downloaded, etc. Just a thought.....I really hate systems that don't let me roll back mistakes, even when I discover them almost immediately... -CHB -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker(a)noaa.gov

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ImportError running 'test' on namespace package - other package in namespace not found
by Jason R. Coombs April 17, 2020

April 17, 2020

I've got two projects: mynamespace.myprojectA and mynamespace.myprojectB myprojectB depends on myprojectA. I'm using setuptools 0.6c8 to manage both projects. Both projects are registered using 'setup develop'. Both projects are accessible from an interactive interpreter: PS C:\Users\me\projects> python Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Feb 21 2008, 13:11:45) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import mynamespace.myprojectA >>> import mynamespace.myprojectB >>> from mynamespace.myprojectA import mymoduleZ However, when I run 'setup test' in myprojectB, the tests fail with File ".mymoduleZ.py", line NNN, in [some context] from mynamespace.myprojectA.mymoduleZ import MyClassC ImportError: No module named myprojectA.mymoduleZ In setup.py, the test_suite is nose.collector. I searched and couldn't find anyone else with this problem. Is this a supported configuration? Is there something I can do to make tests work with interdependent projects with the same root namespace? If there's not something obvious I should be doing differently, I'm happy to put together a minimal test case that reproduces the problem. Any suggestions are appreciated. Sincerely, Jason R. Coombs

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Provide a way to bundle and extract license files
by Steve Jorgensen March 7, 2020

March 7, 2020

The project I am working on now needs to include license files for all of the 3rd party code that it includes. Since license files are not included in distribution packages, the process for doing this is exceedingly complex, error prone, and in some cases, impossible. The build process builds URLs to license files in package source code repositories based on version number, but this is dependent upon several things… 1. The source code repository is accessible via the Internet and still exists. 2. There is a tag for each version (not always true). 3. Tags follow a consistent naming pattern with respect to version numbers (not always true). I believe that it makes sense to provide a standard means for distribution packages to include license files and then encourage package authors to use it.

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[setuptools] Install entry point only if extras_require are satisfied?
by Jonatan Palsson March 6, 2020

March 6, 2020

Hi, I'm modifying a python project which uses setuptools for installation. The project installs an entry point as such: setup_args["entry_points"] = { "console_scripts": ["w1thermsensor = w1thermsensor.cli:cli [CLI]"] } where [CLI] is a reference to an extra_requires entry. This entry looks like this: extras_require=dict(CLI="click>=7.0") With these two lines, the current behavior is that the w1thermsensor entry point is *always* installed when "setup.py install" is invoked, but the entry point will cause an error if its dependencies are not available. I would like to change the behavior, so that the entry point is *not installed* if the extra dependencies are not available (and perhaps also show a warning, indicating that this entry point has not been installed). How can I do this? Cheers, Jonatan

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The base docker images for manylinux appear to be private
by Sylvain Corlay March 1, 2020

March 1, 2020

It seems that the base images used for manylinux wheels are not publicly available. For example, https://quay.io/pypa/manylinux2010_centos-6-no-vsyscall gives a 403 error ("you are not authorized to view this resource"). I think that it would make sense for reproducibility purposes to make these images public. (I have opened an issue about this on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/pypa/manylinux/issues/481). Best,

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Mailing list
by Daniel Scott Feb. 26, 2020

Feb. 26, 2020

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

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parver: parse and manipulate PEP 440 version numbers
by Frazer McLean Feb. 21, 2020

Feb. 21, 2020

Hi, parver is my package for parsing and manipulating PEP 440 version numbers. I have just released version 0.3. For more information: PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/parver/ Repository: https://github.com/RazerM/parver Documentation: https://parver.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Thanks, Frazer

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PyCon US 2020 Packaging Summit: Registration and Topic Proposal
by Paul Ganssle Feb. 19, 2020

Feb. 19, 2020

/Cross-posting this announcement to both distutils-SIG and discourse. The main discussion thread should be on the discourse <https://discuss.python.org/t/pycon-us-2020-packaging-summit-registration-an…>./ Greetings one and all, Though each of us cuts our own path through the harrowing jungle that is the days of our lives, we are all inevitably drawn closer and closer to a single fate; yes, of course I am talking about PyCon 2020’s Packaging Summit! April is looming on the horizon, threatening to take us unawares, but we are a crafty sort, and have prepared to meet its ambush with a secret weapon: DILIGENT PREPARATION AND SPREADSHEETS! In my last announcement, I asked that you save the date: *Thursday, April 16, 2020*, but provided you no other action items. I am now coming to you with TWO actions that you can take. /If you don’t know what the packaging summit is, please see the website for more details <https://us.pycon.org/2020/hatchery/packaging>./ 1. *Register*! This year we will be collecting registration ahead of time, and like the Language Summit we will be curating the list of attendees to try and maximize the effectiveness of the limited time we have for these discussions. In addition to people actually working on packaging tools, we’re also looking to see people with many different perspectives participating in the discussions, so if you are on the fence as to whether or not you qualify but you’re interested in participating, please register. You can register at http://bit.ly/python-packaging-summit-2020-reg Registration is open /now/ and we will close the registration form on *March 7th, 2020*. All registration decisions should be finished by *March 15th, 2020*. 2. *Propose topic for discussion*! In previous years, topics were proposed in the room or ahead of time on discourse. This year, we’ll be collecting discussion topics with something closer to a private Call for Proposals, and then releasing all the discussion topics for public voting at the same time. We’ll be doing it this way to prevent biasing certain selections based on their position in the voting list or length of time available to be voted on. Topic suggestions will be evaluated independent of the submitter; please propose any topic you would like to see discussed — you don’t have to be the driver of an idea to propose it. We will schedule about 5 minutes at the beginning of each discussion period for someone to give a quick introduction to the topic. By default the person (or people) who proposed the topic will be responsible for either giving that introduction or delegating the task to someone else, but if one of your proposals was selected and you cannot present or find someone to present, the organizers will find someone to give the introduction. You may find the topic proposal form at http://bit.ly/python-packaging-summit-2020-topics Topic proposal is open /now/ and will close on *March 7th, 2020*. Topic voting is expected to run from March 9th - March 30th. This and other information is available at our website: https://us.pycon.org/2020/hatchery/packaging/ If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to respond on the discourse <https://discuss.python.org/t/pycon-us-2020-packaging-summit-registration-an…> or to contact me or one of the other organizers.

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