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Comment by bennofs | Hacker News Reader

Python has/had a terrible packaging story though. As you said, dependencies weren't really documented. Rust, on the other hand, documents all dependencies in Cargo.toml. And dependencies can easily be parsed from Cargo.toml without the need to execute any code (as would be required in the case of python)

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> Python has/had a terrible packaging story though. As you said, dependencies weren't really documented.

I wonder where have you lived? I rarely found (if ever) an undocumented dependency list for any serious Python project in the last couple of years.

python's packaging, especially compared to state of the art which cargo represents, is really, really poor. documenting direct dependencies is just a start. requirements.txt is somehow simplistic and complex at the same time (remember about the special options which thankfully aren't used too much) and you can also list dependencies in setup.py, too.

there's the Pipfile initiative which gives me much hope, though :)

Are you talking about requirements.txt? Requirements.txt falls short of cargo or really any other mainstream language's dependency doc (no reproducible builds, for one thing -- effectively almost as bad as undocumented).

Mostly requirements.txt, yes. It's a standard and it has been a really long time I used a package where I didn't find one.

What you mean by no reproducible builds?

Requirements.txt + virtualenv, everything is fine.

Really, significantly easier to not screw up in a large org than bundler, because dependencies don't leak by default.

Actually, `bundle exec` is way easier to use than virtualenv.

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