[Distutils] Need for respect (was: PEP 438, pip and --allow-external)

[Stefan Krah]

Noah Kantrowitz <noah at coderanger.net> wrote:
> Sorry, going to have to stop you here. This, and all your conclusions based
> on this assumption, are flat out incorrect. You are far far far in the
> minority of people that think this is what PyPI is.

The vast majority of Python users does not blog, is not on mailing lists
and does not attend PyCon.  These users have no expectations whatsoever
and will take for granted what they hear on blogs, mailing lists, IRC,
and Google+.

I find it a very unhealthy situation if a couple of people that hold the
keys to the infrastructure are not neutral at all, here and in other
public channels.


*Of course* the users that you talk to agree with you.  You are the
infrastructure experts!


> It was this at one point, but few old-timers are still around to remember
> those days and new users have very different expectations driven by the
> cites linux package servers/systems as well as tools like rubygems and cpan.

I have been using Python since 2005. I've never used PyPI until about 2010.
>From the appearance of the website (i.e. without talking to anyone about it),
I instantly assumed that it was an *index* where people could list their
packages.

Up to 2010 I had never felt the need to use an automated download tool.
Most packages were available in the Linux distributions, and I installed
obscure packages manually into /usr/local.


Then Mark Dickinson told me that several users prefer a download tool
named "pip", so I listed cdecimal on PyPI.


Since then I've been using pip to try something out quickly, but never
for actually installing anything on an important system.


I'm a Linux user.  At no time did I have any expectation that pip should
function in the same way that apt-get does.  When I used pip for the first
time, the very first thought was "nice, this looks like FreeBSD ports".


Stefan Krah