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Comment by pabs3 | Hacker News Reader

Please note that Explosion does not like redistribution of SpaCy, they expect everyone to only use the builds they produce, so it would not be a good idea to package it for your favourite distro.

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I'm sorry that this conflicted with your plans, but I feel strongly that distributing Python libraries via system package managers such as apt is very bad for users. The pain is felt especially by users who are relatively new to Python, who will end up with their system Python in a confusing state that is difficult to correct.

We of course encourage anyone to clone the repo or install from an sdist if they want to compile from source. In fact you can do the following:

    git clone https://github.com/explosion/spaCy
    cd spaCy
    make

This will build you a standalone executable file, in the pex format, that only depends on your system Python and does not install any files into your system. You can copy this artifact into your bin and use it as a command-line application.

That is sad, I would use SpaCy more if it had Debian packages (in particular in Debian). Python stuff packaged by Debian seems to work very well for me and has been for years.

At $work we have internal packages of SpaCy and dependencies, not yet updated to 3.0 though. It was relatively easy to package using py2dsc from stdeb.

Pretty poor choice of license if they wanted me to care about their builds, tbh.

Their concern is poor user experience when the documentation on the web doesn't match what versions are being redistributed by other folks.

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