On Fri, 31/1/14, Brian Wickman <wickman@gmail.com> wrote:
There are myriad other practical reasons. Here are some:
Thanks for taking the time to respond with the details - they are good data points to think about!
Lastly, there are social reasons. It's just hard to convince most engineers to use things like pkg_resources or pkgutil to manipulate resources when for them the status quo is just using __file__. Bizarrely the social challenges are just as hard as the abovementioned technical challenges.
I agree it's bizarre, but sadly it's not surprising. People get used to certain ways of doing things, and a certain kind of collective myopia develops when it comes to looking at different ways of doing things. Having worked with fairly diverse systems in my time, ISTM that sections of the Python community have this myopia too. For example, the Java hatred and PEP 8 zealotry that you see here and there. One of the things that's puzzled me, for example, is why people think it's reasonable or even necessary to have copies of pip and setuptools in every virtual environment - often the same people who will tell you that your code isn't DRY enough! It's certainly not a technical requirement, yet one of the reasons why PEP 405 venvs aren't that popular is that pip and setuptools aren't automatically put in there. It's a social issue - it's been decided that rather than exploring a technical approach to addressing any issue with installing into venvs, it's better to bundle pip and setuptools with Python 3.4, since that will seemingly be easier for people to swallow :-) Regards, Vinay Sajip