[Python-Dev] Yearly PyPI breakage

[David Wilson]

This is mostly just observational, and not meant primarily as criticism
of the fabulous work of Donald and others (ignoring pypa, also the
prompt, reliable, and skilled support responses common on such places as
IRC), however I can't help but notice that PyPI governance seems to come
under fire vastly more often than similar and much more popular
packaging systems, and some choices that have been made particularly in
recent years have caused a noticeable amount of dissent with what might
be considered the typical developer.

When a contributor to the core language is having repeat issues
maintaining some basic element of the function of the packaging system,
might it be fair to reflect on how changes to those functions are being
managed?

There are PEPs covering a great deal of the work done to PyPI recently,
but, and I say this as someone who has bumped into friction with the
packaging tooling in the relatively recent past, even I despite my
motivations to the contrary, I have not read most of them. It seems the
current process is observed by few, does not sufficiently address the
range of traditional use cases that were possible in the past, and the
first the common user learns of a change is when pip (after insisting it
must be upgraded) fails to function as it previously did.

The usual course then is some complaint, that leads to distutils-sig,
which ultimately leads to pointing at some design work that was only
observed by perhaps 50 people max that turns out had some edge cases
that hurt in a common use case.

Is there something to contemplate in here? I dislike posting questions
instead of answers, but it seems apparent there is a problem here and it
continues to remain unaddressed.


David


On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 07:06:12PM +0000, Stefan Krah wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Could someone enlighten me which hoops I have to jump through
> this year in order to keep pip downloads working?
> 
> Collecting cdecimal
>   Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement cdecimal (from
> versions: )
> No matching distribution found for cdecimal
> You are using pip version 7.1.2, however version 8.1.1 is available.
> You should consider upgrading via the 'pip install --upgrade pip' command.
> 
> 
> If this continues, I'm going to release a premium version that's
> 50% faster and only available from bytereef.org or Anaconda.
> 
> 
> 
> Stefan Krah
> 
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