[Distutils] PEX at Twitter (re: PEX - Twitter's multi-platform executable archive format for Python)

[Donald Stufft]

On Feb 1, 2014, at 11:50 AM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> On Sat, 1/2/14, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
>> Additionally I'd point out that, looking at how you've
>> implemented it, it seems to depend on the fact that distil
>> is a single file and thus doesn't need installed into
>> site-packages.
> 
> No, I don't believe that's the case - I developed (and continue to
> develop) distil without running it as a single-file executable, since
> most of its code is in a zip when deployed as a single file, so not
> readily debuggable. The deployment of distil as a single file, though
> seen by some as controversial (because unusual), is merely
> meant as a convenience. Any other deployment mechanism would
> mean using pip to install it, which kind of defeats the purpose :-)
> 
>> Finally I haven't touched distil because you've been less then
>> forthcoming about it's own code. I realize it's just using zip tech
>> to bundle it and thus I can unpack it and read it but:
> 
> Well, it takes less commitment to try it out as a black box and report
> failures or usability drawbacks than to dig into its source code, but
> there hasn't been a lot of feedback, so I really doubt if that's a big
> barrier to people trying it out. I don't believe pip users spend a lot of
> time looking into pip source code.
> 
> As you say, the code is inspectable, though not as readily as it
> would be if it were on GitHub, say. I haven't given particular thought
> to the license since I haven't published it, but there's no conspiracy
> to keep anything secret or proprietary, and nothing is obfuscated.
> 
> I've been looking for usability feedback and some of the features are
> still experimental (not so much on the installation side, more on the
> build side), so it's premature to open it up fully: I'm not looking for code
> contributions, as distil is still a test-bed for distlib and some ideas
> about how to improve the user experience. If that means some people
> lose interest, I'm OK with that: I've contributed plenty to open source and
> I expect to continue to do so. I just don't subscribe to the idea that
> somehow everything magically gets better when it's put on GitHub.

I never said anything gets magically better on GitHub, I told you the
reason why *I* haven’t bothered to try it. You can do what you want
with that information, ignore it or otherwise. I have a ton of things to
do in my packaging time from pip to PyPI to PEPs and most people
tend to have limited time. If you want people to try your thing out
the onus is on you to make it attractive for them to try. As it is right now
it’s not attractive for me as I can’t look to see how it’s doing something
and then go and try to add that to pip or even improve distil itself.

> 
> Note that distlib is licensed under a valid OSS license, but it hasn't
> made much difference in terms of the amount of feedback I've
> received.

Distlib is a significantly different case, it’s a library that is going to be
directly useful for a very small population of people. The vast majority
of people do not have any need or desire to directly work with distlib.

I mean think about it, it’s basically a library that is going to be useful
primarily to people writing an installer, so you’ve got pip, zc.buildout,
easy_install, distil, and maybe curdling as the bulk of your entire
demographic. Of those pip has roughly 3 active developers at the
moment, No idea on zc.buildout, easy_install has 1, distil has 1, and
curdling has I have no idea. So your main demographic can probably
be counted on your fingers alone. Of course you haven’t received a ton
of feedback. I can guarantee you that if distlib wasn’t released under an
OSS license that pip wouldn’t have used it, and then you likely wouldn’t
have gotten at least half of the issues filed on the bug tracker which came
from a member of the pip developers.

> 
> Regards,
> 
> Vinay Sajip


-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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