Where am I flaming anything to death here? The sole purpose of the post was to point out that certain things worked in setuptools that broke with the introduction of pip. That's neither bashing setuptools or pip, just stating something that you can observe yourself.
It's an observation of an unfortunate effect of someone else taking the work of someone else to make a new tool and missing a usecase that the old tool supported with the end result of having two tools with overlapping usecases, but neither is a superset of the other.
With some modifications virtualenv + pip works perfectly fine for us. It just takes some extra work and it's unfortunate that it had to happen. Personal lesson learned: try not to replace tools in the future without understanding all the usecases of the old tool first.
> If you want to help
I think that's one of the big fallacies of open source: that you should fix it yourself rather than saying that something is not working. I reserve the right to feel unhappy when something does not work and I reserve the right to share my experiences with others without having to feel guilty about not helping out.
I tried patching pip to be able to install binary eggs but it turned out to be impossible without replicating all the logic in easy_install because pip by design does not follow it. Rather than making pip2 I decided against it and looked at what the problem actually is: we want to have fast builds. So we could solve the problem by copying over virtualenvs and fixing the paths. Perfect? No! But it's a simple fix and solves our problem.
That this functionality still doesn't exist years later I think is due in part to the problem domain – people find it easier to change parts of their workflow than to add this functionality, and the whole problemspace is kind of hairy which makes it hard to advance without causing regressions in somebody else's weird workflow. (And admittedly the code is hairy too – but who wants to fix that? I don't! No one does!)
I did not even manage to come up with a patch that adds binary support. I looked into it one or two months ago and the way pip finds and installs packages is very different from how easy_install does it. It looked like too big of a task for me to do in the time I allocated for it.
Until two months ago I did not care at all about binary distributions. It never was an issue for me. Suddenly a requirement change and I was presented with a problem that turned out to be tricky to fix with pip but easy as pie with easy_install.
This is not a criticism on either pip or you as a person, just an observation of how easy it is to miss something because it does not fit ones personal requirements. I certainly did not care about binary eggs until I had to deploy code to more than one machine and wanted to have the ability to quickly switch between releases.
> And admittedly the code is hairy too – but who wants to fix that? I don't! No one does!
Yes. And now it's getting replaced with a new system and I hope that's not going to make the same mistakes. I certainly don't feel like I'm up to the task of making a replacement for distutils/setuptools.
I never ever uninstalled a package since I started using virtualenv. I always just trash the venv every once in a while and recreate it from a requirements.txt.
The title. Change the title to something neutral and it will match the article. Good read.
This is exactly why autotools is so hard to replace in the C/C++ world for distributing source packages on Linux/Unix/etc., and why CMake/SCons/Jam/etc. have only ever had success in the right niche (projects which are very large or cross-platform).
I think that pip + distribute intended to be a pragmatic approach you're calling for and that distutil2 is the cleanup/rewrite/redesign you said should happen after. Except it's not as clean cut as "repair setuptools with as much hacks as necessary and then rewrite the implementation once all design decisions have been finalized".
That said, you're completely right, use cases were forgotten and distutils2 might have started too soon. Hopefully your article sparks interest in those others use cases.
This article is an explanation of the mechanics of that process: why packaging isn't great. It's a software engineering lesson about use cases and partial supersets of features. I really enjoyed reading it.
Every developer should know one of the very helpful and working ways of doing things in open source software development: "Stop complaining, fix it."
It's one thing to complain about closed source software that you have to use and probably paid for as well. But a very different one to complain about free and open source software that you want to use.
Stop the bickering, start the work on fixing the problem instead.
I'm exhausted by the vitriol; I'd ignore a bug report (and have) that described things as idiotic, and there are avenues for people to help chime in and guide the future.
Nothing is unfixable.
I hope there was not because that was not my intention at all. It's more an observation that replacing things with other things is a dangerous thing because you can easily dismiss parts of the design as “useless” by accident.
I had the feeling that happened when ditching setuptools and that's a mistake that problem should not be repeated.
I made that mistake in the past already at one point where I tried to replace the Python logging library and I missde perfectly valid usecases in the process.
I'd like to fix it too, but honestly I don't think people would adopt my package manager if I were to create something new from scratch.
virtualenv => a way of isolating a set of python libraries.
Sort of like a chroot for Python libraries.
(Python's version of Perl's perlbrew or Ruby's
rvm)
pip => Supercedes easy_install, but as this post mentions,
doesn't cover 100% of the use-cases (just the most
common ones). Think of it as Python's version of
Perl's cpanminus (aka cpanm).
burrito => The README says it all:
With one command, have a working Python
virtualenv + virtualenvwrapper environment
virtualenvwrapper => A set of shell scripts/functions for
working with multiple virtualenvs in
development. Basically sets them all up
in a central location so that you can
do things like:
workon my-websight-library-set[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183721 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795333 [3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856131
There are different level/kinds/what-have-you of users/coders. There are wizards who write operating systems, grey-beards who write API's, application developers, scripters, and application users. It's perfectly valid for one kind of person to complain to another with no hope of fixing the issue themselves.
I work on open-source middleware both for a living and for fun and I welcome complaints about particular use-cases just as much (if not more than) patches. Cultural silos do exist between the different kinds/levels of coders and these kinds of heated conversations are needed. I can't even count how many times I've received a complaint from an app developer that ended up being a valid use-case that I had not foreseen. In fact, most of the time fixes for these issues are easy on my end. These complaints are helping me expand the user-base and utility of my code. In cases where the fix is not simple, it means there is a deeper architectural issue that I need to put on the road map. Even if they hurt my pride occasionally, these users are helping me and are contributing.