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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

Nowhere in pypa documentation is your simple workflow described or mentioned. Instead it's a jumble of links to a myriad of tools including hatchling, flit, pdm, etc. and basically just a shoulder shrug, 'I don't know, figure it all out yourself' message. This article makes a great point that the current pypa 'guidance' is too confusing and vague for actual end users (i.e. people that don't work directly on pypa or haven't been studying python packaging for decades).

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I agree that it's confusing. That being said, there is an official PyPA tutorial that goes through the exact steps need to produce the commands I suggested, so I don't think it's accurate to say that it's nowhere to be found[1].

Edit: Unfortunately it's easy to confuse the above tutorial with this one[2], which is specifically for setuptools. So I can appreciate end user confusion around the documentation, particularly in that respect!

[1]: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/tutorials/packaging-p...

[2]: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/distributing-p...

No I'm looking at link 1 and specifically have an issue with the huge table of options for how to setup your pyproject.toml--it has tabs for hatchling, flit, pdm, etc. but _zero_ description of why I would want to use one of those tools. It's just more confusing, like you're being thrown a bag of parts and no description of what to build or how to do it.

To be honest that entire pypa doc should be like two paragraphs long instead of 1000+ words. It should be basically, "ok to package your python app just run <official python tool to init a package>, that's it you're done!". Every decision should be made for me, like it is with npm, cargo, etc. I shouldn't have to think beyond running one command.

That's what python end users need. We don't need a million tools and huge docs with seemingly no vision or goal. We need to get shit done and the less time we faff about with packaging and tooling the better.

Yep. There being no documentation to really empower someone to work out what to use, to me very directly says “there’s some political spat going on that I’m being exposed to here”.

that "political spat" was actually targeted harassment towards a former PyPA member the last time someone actively working on packaging.python.org tried to be remotely opinionated. Since this ended with them stepping away and no one else has volunteered, it remains unopinionated.

Sounds like the steering council or whatever that runs python nowadays needs to step up. If people are being targeted for trying to improve packaging then the steering council should make a decision and direct all commentary, etc. to them, not individuals documenting best practices.

The whole 'let the community figure it out' seems to have failed and is causing nothing but more confusion and now attacks on people. The council needs to step up and say, "this is how python packaging will work, period. End of story, end of debate. There is no more discussion on this, the decision is final. All other python packaging tools now are non-standard and not recommended for use anymore".

That was the one good thing a BDFL model for leadership could achieve, making a hard decision in the face of many strong opinions.

Edit: My sibling comment has another answer, which makes me believe I'm lacking context. So I've removed this comment, in the interest of not offering opinions outside of what I know.

A few weeks ago, I was attempting to help introduce someone to Python. I felt embarrassed at trying to paper-over how complicated and confusing the initial configuration is for a newbie. No officially endorsed best-practices to which I could point. Half a dozen tribes with their own competing solutions and guidance.

A definitive statement from Python.org as to The Way would go so far.

AFAIK in the python 2 era it was the de-facto standard (just swap "python -m venv" with "virtualenv"). All these new tools have just made it more complicated and it's not clear to me what they gain, seems to me like they've simply succeeded in convincing people it's complicated by obscuring what's actually going on.

Correct. And most people back then were just using `pip install -r requirements.txt`, including different files for dev/test/prod as needed.

I worked at one company that used buildout back then, which seemed relatively rare, but buildout was more flexible and allowed you to do things like installing system packages or running your own scripts. We used it to pull down config files that weren't checked into the repo but still wanted to be shared, helping setup the local developer environment, and a few other things.

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