Comment by radonek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by radonek | Hacker News Reader

What a great article.

We start with learning that we absolutely need this Poetry thing because… it's what everyone else uses. It's refreshing to see author who can skip usual badly argued justifications and just plain admin that he does not know shit and is just following rest of the herd. Then we continue by "solving" depependencies by usual way of ignoring them and just freezing whatever happens to be present.

Then there is inevitable firing up of virtualenv, because that's just what you have to do when dealing with messed up dependencies.

Next one is new to me. Apparently, one does not just set up git hooks nowadays but use separate tool with declarative config. Because if you ever happen upon something not covered by the Tool, that would mean you are no longer part of the herd.

Then we push our stuff straight to pypi, because of course our stuff can't possibly have any dependencies outside of python herd ecosystem. It's not like we knew our dependencies anyway.

Then comes the fun part, pulling in tox, because when you have special tool to handle dependencies, what you just need is another tool with different environment and dependency model.

Code quality section I will just skip over, seeing what pass for code quality these days makes me too sad. What follows is setup of several proprietary projects that modern opensource seemingly can't exist without. What is more interresting is "tyding up" by moving code from git root to subdir. Now, this is of course perfectly sensible thing to, but I wonder why is it called 'src'? Maybe some herd memeber saw compiled language somewhere and picked it up without understanding difference between compiled binary and source code?

Now don't take this as if I have problem with the article content in itself. No, as a primer to modern python packaging it's great. It's not authors fault that his work is so comprehensive it lays out bare all the idiosyncrasies, herd mentality, cargocultism and general laziness of python ecosystem these days. Or is it?

> Poetry thing because…

pip freeze doesn't pin transitive dependencies and so you have to pick something and Poetry is fine and actively developed.

> virtualenv, because that's just what you have to do when dealing with messed up dependencies

No that's what you do when you have multiple dependency trees for different projects on your system. Somehow people got the message that global variables were bad but still think that "random bullshit strewn on my specific system" is a great way to make software that works on other people's machines.

> Because if you ever happen upon something not covered by the Tool

You write your own hook because it's entirely plugin based.

> tox, because when you have special tool to handle dependencies, what you just need

A tool that doesn't pollute your development environment with testing packages and doesn't run your tests in your development environment, hygiene that before this tool basically nobody bothered to do because it was tedious.

> pip freeze doesn't pin transitive dependencies

AFAIK it lists all installed packages and hence pins all dependencies.

Yes, unfortunately all dependencies are frozen at the same level, so it becomes really hard to distinguish between what your actual dependencies, and sub-dependencies, and sub-sub-dependencies are.

Use pip install -c constraints.txt.

Jeez, I skimmed the article, and saw what I assume to be a comprehensive but basic primer on modern packaging, like you say. But I also inferred that the author is probably a newer programmer, with only a few years of experience. He's learning about tools and best practices in an accessible language and having fun sharing knowledge through his blog.

The sentiment behind your comments is shared, but I don't see the need to sarcastically rant about it and rail all the suggestions OP made.

If anything, I'm surprised someone with more experience didn't see the post for what it is, and attacking someone's post like this just shows immaturity when you could have easily taken those opinions and formed a constructive argument or given good advice.

I had the same reaction. Not much explaining, no justification for the tooling decisions, pushing more undocumented code to pypi because why not, "I saw this other package do this", etc.

I guess it's great if you're just looking for a shortcut to push something up to pypi, but my guess is someone new to it won't really understand what's going on other than some vague sense that they're following "best practices".

And then I imagine that same person will go on to write another article like this, and on and on we go!

Then go write your own opinionated article on your blog. For myself, I was already thinking about trying to develop a package and this gives me a nice starting point for doing so even if I don't use all the same tools to do it.

the irony here is python packaging has sucked forever, and this is just another example of it. "Do more with less" has never entered the average python developers mind.

you'd think herd mentality might help it but it only creates more packaging solutions.

Now days, I've stopped using python outside of tiny scripts and I will never touch it for a large project.

The problem with Python is it's too successful. It has too many useful libraries. I don't really like it very much but it's really hard to ignore it.

There is exactly one thing I miss from Python packaging tools: developer mode. I can factor out parts of an application into a library and develop both at the same time by installing the library in editable mode and pointing to the library's local directory. This is something I've always wanted but never had in every other language I know. Only god knows how much time I spent trying to do exactly this with git submodules.

Julia had a dev mode as well

https://pkgdocs.julialang.org/v1/managing-packages/#developi...

It’s packaging tool is top notch. Maybe because it’s developed as a core part of the language.

Good to know. Never tried Julia myself but I see a lot of Julia posts here. I'm also aware it has a really interesting foreign interface with Python, never saw anything like that before.

> Maybe because it’s developed as a core part of the language.

Always thought it was strange how libraries and packaging never seem to be considered part of the language. My favorite example is Scheme: a beautifully minimal language but with no library support and the result was endless fragmentation due to unportable implementations.

I'm not sure I understand this. Do you mean having an app instance using library code from local git instead of pip package? I do that all the time with a Makefile and some symlinks.

Yeah. Pip already has that feature built in. I've hacked up partial solutions for some other languages but they're not as seamless. For C I tried git submodules but it's not really designed for that.

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