Python, Be Bold!

[Michael Torrie]

On 1/2/20 2:41 AM, Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer wrote:
> i wonder who uses windows

If this kind of thing is important to a user , what you propose would
probably be the responsibility of the entity that is producing a Python
distribution, such as Anaconda.  Usually in such cases these
distributions are not targeted at developers per se, but scientific
users who write small programs to solve particular problems.  And it may
be appropriate in that case.

Python is just a language specification and some tools (including a
reference implementation of the interpreter and standard library). It's
not an IDE and it's not a software distribution.  I know that other
languages have turned themselves into such things.  Particularly node.js
with npm, and that has been a real mess on occasion.  I haven't heard
anything about Java being like this, though.  I guess Visual Studio has
added a package manager.  However that's separate from the language
itself (C#, C++, etc).

How would you determine what should be updated? The core libraries are
already updated with the interpreter version, and have some dependency
on the interpreter version.  You seem to be suggesting that third-party
libraries from PyPi or other places should automatically update, and
that seems like a bad idea to me, as they each operate under their own
standards of API compatibility, quality, and so forth.  All you have to
do is look at the mess that is npm in node.js to see what this idea has
some real problems if you were to update everything in one swoop in a
semi-automated fashion.

Personally if I were working on a large Python project that I wanted to
release to clients involving a few third-party packages, I would not be
interested in any sort of automatic updating.  Without testing, such
automatic updates could easily break my program.  And the last thing I'd
want is a client or customer to be updating dependencies on his own!

How would you address these issues?