Python distribution is honestly horrific. The worst thing is that I actually see people defending it or saying it isn't that bad if you simply learn it "properly" but I have no idea what they mean when they say this.
I love making libraries but this Python packaging stuff is just so painful. Such a shame, Python has a really nice module system. There's one feature that I love though: editable mode. Finally I can develop and use a library at the same time! I've been trying to accomplish this with git submodules since forever.
Personally I’m also confused by Ruby. I guess Java is sort of okay, but which languages do people feel have excellent package management?
Ruby's rubygems, node's npm, and the elm package manager all get different things right and wrong, but at least they are a common approach that is somewhat sane. Python is total anarchy. I think most people would disagree with you about .Net, Go, and Javascript today vs python.
With pip you can manually pin versions, or 'freeze' what's currently installed, but then updating them is a manual effort or a third-party service like pyup.io.
> which languages do people feel have excellent package management?
Rust (technically cargo) is probably the best I've seen or used.
The second most important thing they did right was install dependencies locally in the project directory. There is no global state or environment dependency (unless you go out of your way to install some tool globally). Want to do a clean install? rm -rf node_modules and you're done. The only system-wide prerequisite is a single Node installation. No environment variables, nothing.
One mistake they did make was punting on the management of different Node versions, so you have to reach for nvm and any swapping-out has to happen at a global level. Cargo made the right decision to in-house this. However, even then, in my experience it's rarely an issue because Node is so stable.
Please elaborate. I've found Ruby gems to be the simplest packaging system. You make a file containing the gem specification and that's pretty much it. The most annoying part for me was bikeshedding the neatest way to glob all files in the project.
I will say that Ruby gems containing C extensions are really bad. It's cemented in mind the notion that foreign function interfaces must be built into the languages so that compiling code is never necessary.
> which languages do people feel have excellent package management?
Rust packages are really impressive. They just work. It's an isolated ecosystem like all the others, which is weird for a native language like Rust. Dependencies are mostly used at build time, many don't make it to the Linux distrubitons.