[issue16675] Ship Python with a package manager

[Matt Hickford]

New submission from Matt Hickford:

Python should ship with a full-featured package manager. Why?

1. Most programmers would rather use a reliable maintained library for a common task than roll their own code. Then the programmer can get on with solving their unique problems. This assumes the library is convenient to install (and licensed appropriately). 

2. Other languages ship with package managers - Ruby with Gem, Nodejs with Npm. As a result, these languages have extremely successful open-source communities encouraging sharing. https://github.com/languages  Yes, Python has a strong open-source community, but there's a real hurdle to publishing packages. Nodejs is still in short trousers, but https://npmjs.org/ will shortly outnumber Python's package index. 

If you believe sharing is worthwhile, then you should want to make it easy.

Python has a decent package manager (distribute + pip) but it's ironically complicated to install. On Windows 64 bit (a very popular platform), this requires installing a package from source. You, dear Reader, surely find that easy, but it's still a big an ask for anyone new to programming. You perhaps recommend Python to friends wishing to learn programming. Could you explain over the phone how to install a package such as 'requests'? The Django homepage actually forsakes Python package management and encourages new users to build from source.

You only have to write 'python install package' into Google or read http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4750806/how-to-install-pip-on-windows to see just how much *pain* new users have with package management.

I humbly suggest pip (+ distribute), which happens to be the community's de facto standard.

----------
messages: 177437
nosy: Matt.Hickford
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Ship Python with a package manager
type: behavior
versions: Python 2.6, Python 2.7, Python 3.1, Python 3.2, Python 3.3, Python 3.4, Python 3.5

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue16675>
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