[Distutils] Making pip and PyPI work with conda packages

[Chris Barker]

On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 12:05 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> >   % pip install --upgrade pip
> >   % pip install some_conda_package
>
> This gets the respective role of the two tools reversed - it's like my
> asking for "pip install some_fedora_rpm" to be made to work.
>

I agree here -- I was thinking there was some promise in a
conda_package_to_wheel converter though. It would, of course, only work in
a subset of conda packages, but would be nice.

The trick is that conda packages for the hard-to-build python packages (the
ones we care about) often (always?) depend on conda packages for dynamic
libs, and pip+wheel have no support for that.

And this is a trick, because while I have some ideas for supporting
just-for-python dynamic libs, conda's are not just-for-python -- so that
might be hard to mash together.

Continuum has a bunch of smart people, though.

However, having conda use "pip install" in its build scripts so that
> it reliably generates pip compatible installation metadata would be a
> possibility worth discussing - that's what we've started doing in
> Fedora, so that runtime utilities like pkg_resources can work
> correctly.
>

Hmm -- that's something ot look into -- you can put essentially anything
into a conda bulid script --  so this would be a matter of convention,
rather than tooling. (of course the conventions used by Continuum for the
"offical" conda packages is the standard).

But I'm confused as to the roles of pip vs setuptools, vs wheel, vs ???

I see pip has handling the dependency resolution, and finding and
downloading of packages part of the problem -- conda does those already.

So what would using pip inside a conda build script buy you that using
setuptools does not?

And would this be the right incantation to put in a build script:

pip install --no-deps ./

(if you are in the package's main dir -- next to setup.py)

-Chris


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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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