[Distutils] Dynamic linking between Python modules (was: Beyond wheels 1.0: helping downstream, FHS and more)

[Vincent Povirk]

> But it gets messy when you have two systems trying to handle dependencies --
> pip may not realize that conda has already installed something, and vice
> versa. So it's really nicer to have one package manager.
>
> But maybe all you really need to do is teach conda to understand pip
> meta-data, and/or make sure that conda write pip-compatible meta data.

Forgive me, I'm trying to follow as someone who is working with PyPI
but hasn't really used conda or pip. Does a conda environment contain
its own site-packages directory, and does pip correctly install
packages to that directory? If so, I expect supporting PEP 376 would
help with this.

It doesn't help either package manager install dependencies from
outside their repos, it just means that pip will work if the user
installs dependencies from conda first. To be able to install
dependencies, either conda needs to know enough about PyPI to find a
package's dependencies itself (and at that point, I wonder how much
value pip adds compared to 'wheel'), or pip needs to know that it can
delegate to conda when run in this way.