[Numpy-discussion] Announcing toydist, improving distribution and packaging situation

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 3:47 AM, René Dudfield <renesd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Ravi <lists_ravi at lavabit.com> wrote:
>> On Wednesday 30 December 2009 06:15:45 René Dudfield wrote:
>>
>>> I agree with many things in that post.  Except your conclusion on
>>> multiple versions of packages in isolation.  Package isolation is like
>>> processes, and package sharing is like threads - and threads are evil!
>>
>> You have stated this several times, but is there any evidence that this is the
>> desire of the majority of users? In the scientific community, interactive
>> experimentation is critical and users are typically not seasoned systems
>> administrators. For such users, almost all packages installed after installing
>> python itself are packages they use. In particular, all I want to do is to use
>> apt/yum to get the packages (or ask my sysadmin, who rightfully has no
>> interest in learning the intricacies of python package installation, to do so)
>> and continue with my work. "Packages-in-isolation" is for people whose job is
>> to run server farms, not interactive experimenters.
>>
>
> 500+ packages on pypi.   Provide a counter point, otherwise the
> evidence is against your position - overwhelmingly.

Number of packages is a useless metric to measure the success of
something like pypi. I don't even know why someones would think it is
an interesting number. Note that CRAN has several times more packages,
and R community is much smaller than python's, if you care about that
number. Haskell has ~2000 packages, and hackageDB ("haskell's pypi")
is much smaller than python.

You really should not try to make the point that Pypi is working for
the scipy community: I know there is a bias in conferences and mailing
list, but the consensus is vastly toward "pypi does not work very well
for us". The issue keeps coming up. I think trying to convince us
otherwise is counter productive at best.

David