On 6 January 2015 at 17:39, Andrew Barnert
2. The times I've needed this have been ad-hoc scripts (I'm on Windows, so while a Unix user might use a quick shell pipeline with comm, that's less convenient for me) where depending on a 3rd party distribution from PyPI is less ideal.
Why? Current standard Windows installers include pip, and being pure Python you won't need a compiler, so what's wrong with requiring a PyPI distribution? (Of course that means you need to be able to count on a relatively recent Python 3.4+/2.7+, but it's hard to see how that's worse than something in a future version of the stdlib, which would mean you need to be able to count on 3.5+.)
Well, I usually write my "little utility scripts" as simple .py files to be run with the system Python. I tend to use them on multiple machines. So unless a dependency is one of the modules I routinely install (things like requests) the process goes run script, oops, needed that distribution, pip install dist, run it again. Not a big issue certainly (and hardly a showstopper) but annoying. And it does mean I'd need to make a PyPI project for my personal utility functions, which doesn't really seem an appropriate use for PyPI, tbh. Requiring Python 3.5+ isn't a big deal, I routinely put the newest version of Python on all my machines. The ones I can't tend to be "secure", meaning I have no access to PyPI either :-(
And I'll bet if you submit this as a pull request to more-itertools, it'll be accepted, meaning you don't even have to create or maintain a PyPI project.
Thanks for the suggestion, I might do that. Paul