[Python-Dev] OneGet provider for Python

[Vincent Povirk]

Someone pointed out off-list that I didn't provide any explanation of
what OneGet is. I saw it had been brought up on this list earlier, and
incorrectly assumed that meant everyone would know what I was talking
about.

OneGet is a new unified interface for using tools that work with
software, which is being built and will ship with future versions of
Windows (Linux support is planned but seems to be a long way off
currently). It's intended to help solve the problems that a package
manager would solve on Linux, without enforcing any particular ideas
about how software should be packaged, obtained, or installed. It
relies on external components (called "providers") to talk to existing
packaging systems and do any real work.

Currently, the only UI for OneGet is a set of PowerShell commands,
like Install-Package (which can take a filename, url, or name of a
package as long as some provider can make sense of it), but there is
an API available for use by installers, packaging tools that want to
define external dependencies in some generic way, or other UI's.

So, having a Python provider would make it easier for Windows users to
install Python software, and cut down on the work required to package
software written in Python for Windows. (Ideally, in this case
developers would just have to package it in PyPI, or provide a source
archive or .whl, and OneGet should be able to automate installation of
that and everything it needs, in this case probably by installing
Python and pip, and asking pip to do the real work. I am planning to
write the component that figures out all the Python-specific parts of
this.)

Or, more succinctly, the plan is to do everything pip already does (on
Windows only for now), but in a way that also supports all kinds of
other packagers and doesn't require the user to manually install
Python and pip.