On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

On 7 November 2015 at 01:26, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal
<chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
> So what IS supposed to be used in the development workflow? The new
> mythical build system?

I'd like to point out again that this is not just about development workflow. This is just as much about simply *installing* from a local git repo, or downloaded sources/sdist.

The "pip install . should reinstall" discussion in https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/536 is also pretty much the same argument.

Fair question. Unfortunately, the answer is honestly that there's no
simple answer - pip is not a bad option, but it's not its core use
case so there are some rough edges.

My impression is that right now pip's core use-case is not "installing", but "installing from PyPi (and similar repos". There are a lot of rough edges around installing from anything on your own hard drive.

I'd argue that the best way to use
pip is with pip install -e, but others in this thread have said that
doesn't suit their workflow, which is fine. I don't know of any other
really good options, though.

I think it would be good to see if we can ensure pip is useful for
this use case as well, all I was pointing out was that people
shouldn't assume that it "should" work right now, and that changing it
to work might involve some trade-offs that we don't want to make, if
it compromises the core functionality of installing packages.

It might be helpful to describe the actual trade-offs then, because as far as I can tell no one has actually described how this would either hurt another use-case or make pip internals much more complicated.

Ralf