Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

TekMol

Is it possible to publish Python code for others to use simply by putting a repo on a webserver?

In other words, can someone put a line like this into their requirements.txt file?

https://somewhere.com/some/git/repo.git

View on HN

Yes, you can do this: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/topics/vcs-support/

That is pretty awesome!

Why is all the "wheels", "eggs", "PyPi" ... stuff needed then?

New college grad needs something todo?

Probably Ruby owns the award for the worst package names. Can you guess what Sorbet is doing in Ruby ? Or Oniguruma ? Or Ahoy ? Or Figaro ?

Wheels are essentially zip files with all the code required to run it contained in one handy little file for all platforms that the package maintainer chooses to build for. Instead of having to download the source of the packages and building on your machines, you have a cache-able neat little file that contains potentially everything you need to use the package. It makes package installations way faster because it skips the build steps and will ship all the binaries required to run the package (ideally). Eggs were this but are not in use anymore in favor of using wheels. Pypi is the package repository for python packages just like npm

pypi is needed because those personal webservers will inevitably go down. why not github? well, it didn’t use to exist before pypi and it microsoft may still pull a good one

eggs and wheels solve binary distribution between other things, so you can install something that requires compilation without having a compiler or the development libraries installed and to avoid bundling files unnecessary during runtime.

a lot of Python packages contain parts written in native code (often C or Rust) for performance reasons.

pip _can_ compile the code at install-time if your PC has the right build tools -- or it can download pre-built binaries for your host in the form of a "wheel".

pypi has a little more metadata than a git repo, and a place to host version-controlled binaries.

Because so much Python code binds to C extensions that you will need to compile for the correct platform. For instance the new version of Pydantic is now backed by Rust. To avoid everyone having to compile the rust code on their platform, you can upload it pre-compiled for linux, windows etc.

Some packages require build-time dependencies not everyone has, like cryptography now requiring Rust. Some packages like SciPy take a very long time to build, and require a Fortran compiler.

Yes, you just need to add `git+` before the URL, see the pip documentation: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/topics/vcs-support/

Yes

https://github.com/iree-org/iree-samples/blob/main/requireme...

You can do even better using GitHub releases: the GET for a releases page with assets (ie use inspector) functions as an index url. So you can have a repo that publishes wheels to a release called eg `latest` that can function as the index for that package/wheel. You can even have multiple repos that publish to a single such wheel repo release repo (using the ncipollo/release-action GHA).

I don't know what "GitHub releases" are. And I don't want to know :)

I prefer to use as few technologies as possible. And completely stay away from propriatary technologies.

> I prefer to use as few technologies as possible. And completely stay away from propriatary technologies.

This is the most boring and tedious archetype out there.

you can install a package straight from Github:

    pip install https://github.com/whalesalad/verisign-namestudio/archive/refs/heads/master.zip

or from the git repo:

    pip install git+https://github.com/whalesalad/verisign-namestudio.git

Reply on news.ycombinator.com