On 24 January 2014 06:18, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
--------------------------------------------
certainly mention the distlib implementations, but also let's be clear if there is a pypa-recommend tool that is user-facing (like pip), that is using those parts of distlib. In most cases, that is not true currently. As for mentioning distil, I'm inclined to say no. Up to this point, you've presented it as a proof of concept.If you're wanting to mention "distil" as a real option for users, I'm concerned about fracturing the mind of users, but it's something to discuss I guess.
I hear what you're saying. I've positioned distil as a proof of concept purely because it hasn't had widespread use, but I certainly expect it to fulfil the same role as pip functionally (which it must do to be an effective test-bed for distlib). I understand that pip is the officially recommended tool, and don't want to muddy the waters, there being enough confusion about packaging in the wider community. It seems a shame that some of the improvements over pip won't be more widely available, but such is life. I have the use of them, so there's that :-)
The fact we're still working on PEP 426/440/459 so distlib and distil are chasing a moving target also makes it a little difficult to recommend them to end users at this point :) I actually expect that we'll see many of the internals of pip significantly refactored in the next 12 months or so - in addition to metadata 2.0, there's also The Update Framework support as a result of PEP 458, and once we get proper metadata publication on PyPI, then adopting a real dependency solver becomes a far more viable option than it is today (and both conda and Fedora's hawkey have tackled the problem of making a depsolver available to a Python based installation tool). pip, ultimately, is just a CLI - so long as that remains the case, then the internals can change radically (which is why I agree with the idea of it *not* having a public Python API, and instead leaving that to distlib). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia