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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

It does kind of suck. But it’s better than npm... or rubygems... or the python ecosystem... hmm, what language’s package management system doesn’t suck?

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yeah no. rubygems/python/npm are stare of the art compared to go. it’s painful to watch people doing mental gymnastics to justify bad/disconnected from reality decisions that were made.

it’s pretty sad really if you think about it. that there are legitimate use cases where go is really really well suited for the problem.

my vote is on someone coming up with a sane approach at some point and people slowly adopting it.

Python package mgmt is aweful between the virtual env you need, pip that install different things on different OS, sometime the exec is no even in your path, I don't recall how many time I had to install awscli because it was broken, on top of that you add all the problem with python 2/3 ( pip3 ect .. ). Pip installing things as root or in your home folder ...

From all the mgmt I had to use, Python is by far the worst.

Every time I have something in Python to use I pray that pip will install it correctly which is roughly 50% of the cases.

I take it you’ve never used npm

I take it you've never used npm for a large project that's spanned multiple years of different developers while supporting multiple versions of your application while also staying up to date with dependencies.

this has not been my experience. what you describe usually happens for poorly packed things.

also, there is a difference between installing packages and environment management

Yeah, the current state of Python is the worst. Especially in machine learning, it's common that a project only supports one of conda or pip installation, which are often but not always compatible. The idea of storing all dependencies in "requirements.txt" is a good idea but has not standardized across the Python community. IMO all the 2 -> 3 upgrade difficulties have slowed down the development of the Python tooling ecosystem.

This one: https://github.com/tidwall/pkg.sh

CPAN?

JAPH. :)

There’s one I like. It’s in this language from Google.

I like Maven. Fight me.

#triggered

level 35 POM boss. residing in nexus!

Won’t fight you - I agree. Every packaging system has stupid faults, but I generally have fewer headaches with Maven than the rest.

Say what you want about Maven the build system (I’m not going to die on that hill, even though I also prefer Maven to virtually every other build tool I’ve worked with) - but Maven Central and Maven the Package Manager are solid.

Me too.

My day job is on a modular monolith that uses mvn. I'm no expert but I've set up some IT's, setup build pipeline from jenkins, configure some plugins on various steps of the lifecycle, etc. and I guess it's ok, xml takes a lot of space though and it gets ridiculous on big code bases.

I've been working on an android app and use gradle with the kotlin dsl. I haven't really done any programming with the build steps but this is pretty sexy and doesn't need three open/close tags every plugin.

  dependencies {
    implementation(fileTree(mapOf("dir" to "libs", "include" to listOf("*.jar"))))
    implementation("com.google.android.material:material:1.2.0")

Gradle used to use groovy dsl, but with kotlin the syntax is more consistent and auto complete is actually useful.

I've done a ton of work with both Maven and Gradle and I feel like eventually everyone just ends up back to wanting Maven.

The problem with Gradle is that it's flexibility is... dangerous and without some constraint can quickly lead to a lot of pain.

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