On May 6, 2016, at 11:54 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:

So my point is about scope-creep -- if you want the PyPa tools to solve all these problems, then you are re-inventing conda -- better to simply adopt conda (or fork it and fix issues that I'm sure are there….)


Adopting Conda is unlikely to ever happen for the defaulting tooling. The problems that the default tooling attempt to solve are significantly harder than the problems that Conda attempts to solve and switching to it would be a regression. The primary benefit of Conda’s packages over Wheels are that they have a curated repository with people who are ensuring that things build correctly and since they don’t rely on authors to do it correctly, they don’t have to wait for, or convince authors to do this fresh new thing.

The problem is, none of those benefits are something that would apply if we decided to throw away the 588,074 files that are currently able to be installed on PyPI. Us deciding that Conda is the thing to use isn’t going to magically create an army of volunteers to go through and take all 80,000 packages on PyPI and ensure that we get a correctly compiled package on every platform for each version. If we could do that we could just convince everyone to go out and build binary packages, we could just do that with Wheels without requiring forklifting an entire ecosystem.

While wheels are optimized for the pure Python case, there is nothing preventing them from being used to install anything else (Erlang or R or even Python itself). The pynativelib stuff is proof of the ability to do just that— and in distutils-sig land we tend to care a lot more about how these things will affect our downstream consumers like Debian and such than Conda needs to (or should need to!). 

Now, this isn’t to say that Conda is bad or anything, but it’s use as a replacement for the current ecosystem is about as interesting as suggesting we all adopt RPM, or apt-get, or Choclatey, or Ports, or Pacman or whatever flavor of downstream you wish to insert here.

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Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA