Show HN: Combo, the Simple Python Package Manager | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Combo, the Simple Python Package Manager

github.com

15 pointswkcamp6 comments

In my experience pip has always worked quite well.

About the only thing I would like to see from it is making it a bit easier to use, for example something like `npm install --save something` instead of having to tell people about `pip freeze` and venvs etc

To those who look at this, this is my first "official" Python project. I really need help with test suites and whatever. But alas, the package manager works well enough. All feedback is appreciated.

Package management is a hard problem; I'd much rather see efforts to improve pip instead of fragmenting any efforts to improve what pip already does.

I don't want to sound like a dick, but: why?

pip is damn fine.

It's all good. So in my experience, I had issues getting my development environment up to speed at work. We had dependency files, but weren't well maintained. I made Combo so that a Dev-team could easily share a file with other workers and bring their engineers' dev environments up to speed in a few minutes. Furthermore, open source projects could distribute their "Combofiles" with ease, grow their contributor base, and focus more on development than menial issues.

Besides, the main goal of Combo is to eventually join "pip" or take on all the capabilities of pip.

Pip is not fine. Pip doesn't resolve dependencies [0]. It also has no way to sensibly manage the 'semver during development, frozen versions in production' needs of modern development, that both Ruby's Bundler and Node's npm take care of. Those are, in my opinion the 2 biggest requirements of a package manager for non-trivial projects, and it totally fails to handle them.

Here's a post on the latter issue by the developer of pip-tools which aims to solve that problem (I've not tried it yet, but my team is considering it): [1]

[0] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/988

[1] http://nvie.com/posts/better-package-management/

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