[Distutils] Immutable Files on PyPI

[Nick Coghlan]

On 30 Sep 2014 19:06, "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> You're regularly bringing up this argument.
>
> Let's just be fair here: external hosting of packages has been made so
> user unfriendly in recent pip releases, that this has pretty much
> become a non-option for anyone who wants to create a user friendly
> package installation environment.
>
> pip is unfortunately using the same kind of
> --no-one-will-want-to-use-this-option-because-its-too-long
> approach as setuptools/easy_install has done in the past to force
> people into installing packages as eggs rather than installing
> the packages in the standard write to site-packages dir way.
>
> The end result is the same: users will not want to go
> through those extra hoops and thus packages not hosted on PyPI
> itself will be regarded as broken (because they don't install using
> the standard method; not because they are really broken).

I personally think pip needs a virtualenv friendly equivalent to
yum.repos.d or conda channels to improve the multi-index experience.

This is a solved problem from my perspective, we just need folks willing to
spend the time making the case for the proven solution, and adapting it to
the PyPI ecosystem.

> This is what I'm trying to address in discussions like these all
> along. PyPI has a responsibility not only for the part consuming
> part of the Python community, but also for the creating part of it.
>
> While PyPI is great for indexing packages, it's not necessarily
> the best answer for hosting the distribution files and I believe
> we should open up some more to allow for making it possible to
> offer the same kind of user experience while not making pypi.python.org
> the only source of distribution files.
>
> In the Linux world, this already works great by having multiple
> repos which you can switch on/off easily.

And I've said all along that's the experience I would like to see in
upstream Python as well. But the code isn't going to write itself, and
there's also the political work needed to persuade folks that it's the
right path to go down.

> For eGenix, we've found a way to work around the PyPI constraints:
>
>
http://www.egenix.com/library/presentations/PyCon-UK-2014-Python-Web-Installer/
>
> which addresses our user's problems. Still, we'd much rather use
> standard ways of working *with* PyPI rather than work around it.

Sure, I'd like to see that to. It's just only one problem amongst a great
many of them, and people's upstream work is driven by their own balancing
of a complex set of priorities.

Cheers,
Nick.

>
> --
> Marc-Andre Lemburg
> eGenix.com
>
> Professional Python Services directly from the Source  (#1, Sep 30 2014)
> >>> Python Projects, Consulting and Support ...   http://www.egenix.com/
> >>> mxODBC.Zope/Plone.Database.Adapter ...       http://zope.egenix.com/
> >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ...        http://python.egenix.com/
> ________________________________________________________________________
> 2014-09-30: Python Meeting Duesseldorf ...                         today
>
> ::::: Try our mxODBC.Connect Python Database Interface for free ! ::::::
>
>    eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH  Pastor-Loeh-Str.48
>     D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg
>            Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611
>                http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20140930/27e3cbc1/attachment.html>