On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 at 16:25, Coyot Linden (Glenn Glazer) wrote:

This is one of those cases, where those of us who have been around Python for awhile can perhaps infer from context which his meant, but the phrase "put your Python project into development mode" is ambiguous in a way that is different from your example.

The commonly used packaging terminology is actually "editable mode" (at least in the sense that that's what most people seem to call it, so knowing and using that term will get better results from Google ;-)). If you feel inclined to raise a PR against the pip documentation to prefer that term, it can be discussed over there (but note that the underlying setuptools command is `setup.py develop` and that's not likely to change, as it's hard-coded in a number of applications, including pip). But ultimately, I think the reality is that there *are* terminology confusions all over the place in computing, much like in any other discipline (I'm currently teaching someone music, and the number of terms that get re-used in different contexts there is even worse than computing!) So I think that ultimately, beginners simply need to get used to understanding that terms can be context-dependent. It's not easy, and as teachers we can do what we can to make things clearer, but we can't ever completely make such problems go away. Paul

I'm somewhat baffled by your comment here. "Just because something is bad or even often bad, is no reason to let it stay that way or to not try and make things better." I have no idea what gives you the impression that I think that way. *Shrug* I guess I don't understand what you expect here. But if you want to champion a change, I'm not going to stop you. My comment on the packaging terminology stands, though - you'd be better referring to that as "editable mode" as that is common usage, *and* it doesn't clash with the cpython option. Paul On Tue, 2 Mar 2021 at 16:12, Coyot Linden (Glenn Glazer) wrote:

On 3/1/21 08:49, Paul Moore wrote:

On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 at 16:25, Coyot Linden (Glenn Glazer) wrote:

This is one of those cases, where those of us who have been around Python for awhile can perhaps infer from context which his meant, but the phrase "put your Python project into development mode" is ambiguous in a way that is different from your example.

The commonly used packaging terminology is actually "editable mode" (at least in the sense that that's what most people seem to call it, so knowing and using that term will get better results from Google ;-)). If you feel inclined to raise a PR against the pip documentation to prefer that term, it can be discussed over there (but note that the underlying setuptools command is `setup.py develop` and that's not likely to change, as it's hard-coded in a number of applications, including pip).

But ultimately, I think the reality is that there *are* terminology confusions all over the place in computing, much like in any other discipline (I'm currently teaching someone music, and the number of terms that get re-used in different contexts there is even worse than computing!) So I think that ultimately, beginners simply need to get used to understanding that terms can be context-dependent. It's not easy, and as teachers we can do what we can to make things clearer, but we can't ever completely make such problems go away.

Paul

I think we have fundamentally different worldviews, Paul. Just because something is bad or even often bad, is no reason to let it stay that way or to not try and make things better. Engineering almost never makes any problem completely go away, the perfect can't be the enemy of the good.

Personally, since it is newer and not stuck with the problems you mention, I would prefer to change the name of the new Python runtime option than mess with the setuptools mess.

Best,

coyot