On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 3:39 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't think there's much chance of any of this ever working on
Windows - conda will rule there, and rightly so. Mac OS X seems likely
to go the same way, although there's an outside chance brew may pick
up some of the otherwise Linux-only capabilities if they prove
successful.

this is a really good point then -- we're building "platform independent system that, oh actually is a "a few different Linux vendors" system. Which is a perfectly worthy goal, but it was not at all the goal of conda.

I wasn't there, but I think conda started with the goal of supporting three core platforms (that are pretty different) with the same UI, and as much of the same code as possible. And if you want to do that -- it really makes a lot of sense to control as much of the system as possible.

What I'm mainly reacting to here is Chris's apparent position that he
sees the entire effort as pointless.

I don't believe I actually ever said that -- though I can see why'd you'd think so.

But for the record, I don't see it as pointless.

It's not pointless, just hard,

That I do see -- I see it as hard, so hard that it's likely to hit road blocks, so we could make better progress with other solutions if that's where people put their energies. And you said yourself earlier in this post that:

"I don't think there's much chance of any of this ever working on Windows"

One of the "points" for me it to support Windows, OS-X and Linux -- so in that sense -- I guess it is pointless ;-)

By the way, I was quite disappointed when i discovered that conda has done literally nothing to make building cross-platfrom -- I understand why, but none the less, building can be a real pain.

But it's also nice that it has a made a nice clean distinction between package management and building, a distinction that is all too blurred in the distutils/setuptools/pip/wheel stack (which, I know, is slowly being untangled..)

Not in the general case it won't, no, but it should be entirely
feasible for distro-specific Linux wheels and manylinux1 wheels to be
as user-friendly as conda in cases where folks on the distro side are
willing to put in the effort to make the integration work properly.

I agree -- though I think the work up front by the distributors will be more.

It may also be feasible to define an ABI for "linuxconda" that's
broader than the manylinux1 ABI, so folks can publish conda wheels
direct to PyPI, and then pip could define a way for distros to
indicate their ABI is "conda compatible" somehow.

Hmm -- now THAT's an interesting idea...

-CHB

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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