[Distutils] [Numpy-discussion] Proposal: stop supporting 'setup.py install'; start requiring 'pip install .' instead

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Nov 8, 2015 5:23 AM, "Paul Moore" <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>
[...]
> I find it hard to imagine that there are a significant number of users
> who install from development sources but who aren't developers (at
> least to the extent that testers of pre-release code are also
> developers).

I'm not sure exactly what's at stake in this terminological/ontological
debate, but it certainly is fairly common for developers to have
conversations like "thanks for reporting that issue, I think it's fixed in
master but can't reproduce myself so can you try 'pip install
https://github.com/pydata/patsy/archive/master.zip' and report back whether
it helps?" And often the person on the other end of this conversation knows
absolutely nothing about python packaging, might have started learning
python last week, etc. (Or maybe more to the point, you as a developer have
absolutely no idea how much they know or what reasonable or unreasonable
things they'll try if something goes wrong, and don't have time to have a
long tutorial discussion to figure it out, so you need to be able to give
instructions that are robust enough to work regardless of your
interlocutor's actual knowledge level.)

Probably the absolute numbers aren't large, but when you're one of the 5-10
people maintaining a package that has complicated build/install/OS issues
and is used by O(a million) people, many of whom are learning programming
for the first time via your package and immediately using it for their real
work, then these kinds of fuzzy middle cases take up a lot of time :-).

(Maybe this should become an official ui metric. "How easy is your tool to
use interactively", "how easy is your tool to use in an automated way via
shell script", "how easy is your tool to use in a semi-automated way where
we've replaced the shell with a human being who first learned what the
terminal was one week ago".)

-n
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