[Distutils] Maintaining a curated set of Python packages

[Nick Coghlan]

On 16 December 2016 at 00:39, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> Theoretically we could allow people to not just select packages, but also
> package specifiers for their “curated package set”, so instead of saying
> “requests”, you could say “requests~=2.12” or “requests==2.12.2”. If we
> really wanted to get slick we could even provide a requirements.txt file
> format, and have people able to install the entire set by doing something
> like:
>
>     $ pip install -r
> https://pypi.org/sets/dstufft/my-cool-set/requirements.txt

CurseGaming provide addon managers for a variety of game addons
(Warcraft, Minecraft, etc), and the ability to define "AddOn Packs" is
one of the ways they make it useful to have an account on the site
even if you don't publish any addons of your own. Even if you don't
make them public, you can still use them to sync your addon sets
between different machines.

In the context of Python, where I can see this kind of thing being
potentially useful is for folks to manage package sets that aren't
necessarily coupled to any specific project, but match the way they
*personally* work.

- "These are the packages I like to have installed to --user"
- "These are the packages I use to start a CLI app"
- "These are the packages I use to start a web app"
- etc...

It also provides a way for people to vote on projects that's a little
more meaningful than stars - projects that appear in a lot of personal
stack definitions are likely to be generally valuable (the closest
equivalent to that today is mining code repositories like GitHub for
requirements.txt files and seeing what people are using that way).

So yeah, if folks interested in this were to add it to Warehouse (and
hence pypi.org), I think it would definitely be a valuable enhancement
to the overall ecosystem. "What needs to be implemented in order to be
able to shut down the legacy service at pypi.python.org?" is the
*PSF's* focus, but that doesn't mean it needs to be everyone's focus.

Cheers,
Nick.

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