[Python-ideas] package management is not python-dev's problem :-(

[Nick Coghlan]

On 8 June 2016 at 04:14, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
>> On Jun 8, 2016, at 7:02 AM, Thomas Güttler <guettliml at thomas-guettler.de> wrote:
>>
>>>> I would love to see a package management that is easy to use and which
>>>> focuses on simple data structures.
>>>
>>> Also not python-dev's problem - that one falls on distutils-sig, PyPA
>>> and the PSF (but unfortunately is never going to be entirely simple
>>> given Python's broad scope of use).
>>
>> This statement make me sad. Why is this not python-dev's problem?
>>
>
> Historically python-dev hasn’t been involved much in it and almost all of the
> tooling for packaging is developed externally to Python itself. This is generally
> a strength, since packaging tools tend to work best when they’re not lied to the
> lifetime of the language itself.

To help put some specifics on that:

* for the core runtime and standard library, having features appear
only in new Python versions is normal and expected, and the related
update cycles are measured in months (maintenance releases) or years
(feature releases)
* for build and distribution tools, it's highly desirable to offer a
consistent feature set across all widely deployed Python versions
(since there is only one PyPI shared amongst all versions), and the
related update cycles tend to be measured in weeks (maintenance
releases) or months (feature releases)

As such, distutils-sig/PyPA maintain Python 2/3 compatible tooling on
behalf of not only CPython, but also PyPy, Jython, IronPython, and
other sufficiently compatible alternate implementations. There are
some *people* that participate in both communities (including folks
that are both PyPA contributors and CPython core developers), and
there are some issues that remain specifically python-dev's
responsibility (such as providing recent versions of pip by default as
part of CPython installations), but the day-to-day design discussions
are separate.

Cheers,
Nick.

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