[Distutils] PEX at Twitter (re: PEX - Twitter's multi-platform executable archive format for Python)

[Vinay Sajip]

On Sat, 1/2/14, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> My point is that doing it the way virtualenv/pip did avoided a bunch
> of design work and associated testing, and reduced the
> opportunities for bugs - when you're trying to get things done with
> limited resources, that's a sensible engineering trade-off to make.

A "bunch of design work" makes it seem a lot more complicated
than it really is. Your suggestion comes across like an ex post facto
rationalisation of a decision which was perhaps more truly based
on social concerns than technical ones.

Note that I've developed distil as part of my volunteer activities - it
doesn't pay any of my bills - and on my own. And you're telling me
about how to get the best out of "limited resources"? :-)

> That said (and this is a point that hadn't occurred to me earlier),
> it's also worth noting that not only does the bootstrapping
> approach work well enough in most cases, but it also solves the
> problem of being able to easily have a newer (or older!) pip in
> virtual environments than is provided by the distro package
> manager on Linux systems

Eh? The problem of having a newer or older pip in a venv
only exists because pip needs to be in a venv ... so I don't see
the relevance of this to our earlier discussion. Since distil
doesn't occupy a space in venvs,. the concern of a system
version being older or newer than that in a venv doesn't arise.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip