[Distutils] pipenv use cases

[Paul Moore]

On 16 January 2018 at 10:44, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, that's deliberate. We want to target app developers as our
> initial audience, since library and framework developers have
> different needs (and for folks just starting out with library
> development, pipenv + the latest version of Python is actually fine -
> matrix testing only comes into play once folks actually want to
> support older versions, perhaps because the version they started out
> with is no longer the latest one).

Having that up front in the pipenv docs/webpage would probably help
communicate the intention better. At the moment, it's pretty hard to
find. And the general "pipenv is cool!" enthusiasm (which I agree with
- it is :-)) tends to encourage people to try it out for whatever
their use case is (hence Chris' original post). Also, there's a quite
common recommendation around to "build your app as a library and have
its main program as a console script entry point" - tools like pip,
tox, pytest, pew, pipenv itself, etc take that approach, for example.
So separating "app developers" and "library developers" still leaves a
fairly large grey area.

> Local build dependencies are within scope, but pipenv doesn't
> magically fix the development resource constraint problem :)

Understood - as I said, the pipenv devs were very helpful, it just
took a bit of time to establish what I was trying to do, and that it
*was* something that they saw the need to support. Actually
implementing that support can take as long as it needs - I appreciate
the "so much to do, so little time" problem. Better publicised "Python
application development workflow" best practices might have helped
save a little of our time in establishing I had a valid use case and
they intended to support it but didn't yet. That's all I'm really
saying.

Paul