Comment by anentropic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anentropic | Hacker News Reader

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looks potentially interesting but a lot of it is kind of baffling, assumes a lot of familiarity with fairly esoteric topic, not clear where to start

the tutorial page https://www.idp-z3.be/tutorial.html is a bit more enlightening

as is https://interactive-idp.gitlab.io/ learning material

but I didn't find those first, I found the docs first (via the four "learn more" links on the landing page)

and I don't think they are the best starting point

https://docs.idp-z3.be/en/latest/introduction.html

> IDP-Z3 can be installed using the python package ecosystem.

> install python 3, with pip3, making sure that python3 is in the PATH.

> use git to clone https://gitlab.com/krr/IDP-Z3 to a directory on your machine

> (For Linux and MacOS) open a terminal in that directory and run the following command

First thought is... why isn't it published to PyPI?

But then elsewhere https://docs.idp-z3.be/en/latest/IDP-Z3.html

> the idp_engine package available on Pypi.

And looking in the git repo it seems like this is the same package published as https://pypi.org/project/idp-engine/

Why not just say "pip install idp-engine"...?

Thanks for the feedback. We'll see how we can improve the communication.

Quick response: with pypi, you can only install the reasoning engine. By cloning the repository, you get the full suite of tools, including the "interactive consultant".

I see...

I think it could probably be evolved so that they can be pip installed too.

e.g. instead of git clone and `poetry run python3 main.py` maybe your pip package could provide its own cli frontend for running the server.

> Why not just say "pip install idp-engine"...?

(I have nothing to do with IDP-Z3) This is the general pattern:

* If you are a developer: get sources and work on sources, because, probably, you want to add to them or modify them etc. Part of this experience may be creating a package and installing it with pip or some other package installation program, but it's not usually what other developers (contributors) would be working on.

* If you are a user: use the supported package manager to obtain the package and use it through documented interface.

I'm honestly not sure if this is why or how these instructions came to be, but this is a fairly common thing to do, so, w/o looking, I'd guess this is what it is.

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