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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 5 February 2014 01:59, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 4/2/14, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Vinay, please let it drop.
>
>> You accuse us of FUD, yet have presented no evidence that
>> your approach works flawlessly across multiple versions of
>> Fedora, Debian, openSUSE, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu,
>> Windows, Mac OS X, etc,
>
> I merely asked for a hearing, and made no claims I couldn't
> substantiate, and with actual code in places. But you seem
> determined not to give me that hearing, so I'll drop it. It's a
> shame you have to resort to an argument from authority.

No hearing? You haven't answered *any* of our technical objections,
instead dismissing them all as irrelevant.

- doesn't work for packages that require installation (which I had
forgotten until you reminded me)
- doesn't address the distro isolation problem (except by ducking it
entirely and saying "don't install it", which isn't a good end user
experience, especially on Windows - hence the whole PEP 453 thing so
Windows users didn't need to download and run get-pip.py)
- doesn't provide a consistent end user experience (what if they *do*
install it in some virtual environments and not others?)
- doesn't provide any assistance in maintaining a correspondence
between pip versions and projects, which at least some freelancers and
other contractors see as a valuable capability
- should work *in theory* on multiple platforms, but has not been
tested broadly on them the way the current approach has

Hence, "potentially interesting from a technological perspective, but
doesn't solve any of the significant problems currently affecting end
users, so not actually all that interesting from a practical
perspective" is the natural assessment. It's neat that distil is a
standalone script, and hence can be easily run in a venv from outside
it, just as venv in Py 3.4 can bootstrap pip without first activating
the environment by running "<venv python> -m ensurepip". That's a
property of "standalone script" vs "installable package", though, and
one that has trade-offs of its own (some of which are noted above)

Regards,
Nick.

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