On 21 July 2013 16:46, PJ Eby <pje@telecommunity.com> wrote:

Now that I'm thinking about it some more, one of the motivating use
cases for extras in entry points was startup performance in
plugin-heavy GUI applications like Chandler. The use of extras allows
for late-loading of additions to sys.path. IOW, it's intended more
for a situation where not only are the entry points imported late, but
you also want as few plugins as possible on sys.path to start with, in
order to have fast startup.

This type of complexity is completely outside of my experience. So I'm going to have to defer to people who understand the relevant scenarios to assess any proposed solutions.

But could I make a general plea for an element of "keep the simple cases simple" in both the PEP and the implementations, here? I think it's critical that we make sure that the 99% of users[1] who want to do nothing more than bundle up an app with a few dependencies can both understand the mechanisms for doing so, and can use them straight out of the box.

Paul

[1] Yes, that number is made up - but to put it into context, I don't believe I've ever used a distribution from PyPI with entry points depending on extras. In fact, the only case I know of where I've seen extras in *any* context is in wheel, and I've never used them even there.