[Distutils] Handling the binary dependency management problem

[Nick Coghlan]

On 3 December 2013 19:11, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3 December 2013 08:48, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> And wouldn't it be better to make wheel a bit more robust in this regard
>>> than add yet another recommended tool to the mix?
>>
>> Software that works today is generally more useful to end users than
>> software that might possibly handle their use case at some currently
>> unspecified point in the future :)
>
> See my experience with conda under Windows. While I'm not saying that
> conda "doesn't work", being directed to software that turns out to
> have its own set of bugs, different to the ones you're used to, is a
> pretty frustrating experience.

Yeah, I hit the one where it tries to upgrade the symlinked Python in
a virtualenv on POSIX systems and fails:
https://github.com/ContinuumIO/conda/issues/360

> (BTW, I raised a bug report.

For anyone else that is curious: https://github.com/ContinuumIO/conda/issues/396

In looking for a clear explanation of the runtime compatibility
requirements for extensions, I realised that such a thing doesn't
appear to exist. And then I realised I wasn't aware of the existence
of *any* good overview of C extensions for Python, their benefits,
their limitations, alternatives to creating them by hand, and that
such a thing might be a good addition to the "Advanced topics" section
of the packaging user guide:

https://bitbucket.org/pypa/python-packaging-user-guide/issue/36/add-a-section-that-covers-binary

> Let's see
> what the response is like...)

Since venv in Python 3.4 has a working --copies option, I bashed away
at the conda+venv combination a bit more, and filed another couple of
conda bugs:

Gets shebang lines wrong in a virtual environment:
https://github.com/ContinuumIO/conda/issues/397
Doesn't currently support "python -m conda":
https://github.com/ContinuumIO/conda/issues/398

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia