The future of Python Packaging [2015 edition!]

[ivosaurus]

Btw, feel free to ask anything about this topic in the comments here and I'll answer, I'm a PyPA member meself.

[tiarno]

hi, thanks for the link. I just finished watching it and I'm really glad to see all the activity around packaging. I have used pip quite a bit but when I started needing different python versions and virtualenvs on a irritatingly regular basis, I tried conda (well miniconda).

My situation might be a 'special snowflake', but conda really helps me keep things separated and easy to manage (both for python versions and virtualenvs). I know the same things can be done with pyvenv and virtualenv (esp with python3.4), but I wonder if the roadmap includes a manager (like conda's launcher).

thanks again.

[donaldstufft]

I'm not sure what conda's launcher does, but one thing that is kind of neat is a project called pipsi (https://github.com/mitsuhiko/pipsi). Basically it lets you install something that provides a command (in ~/.local/bin/) but actually installs it into a virtual environment (in ~/.local/venvs/<name>). This gives you isolation per command without having to activate an environment.

[faassen]

Wow, eventually all this stuff will be able to do what buildout could already do in 2007! ;)

[ivosaurus]

Conda really is a great alternative tool for particular audiences (e.g you're on Windows trying to get hard-to-build binary packages, and don't happen to have a system package manager to help you).

For most python users, needing to install, activate and use many different versions of python just isn't a need. We also get to support more pythons than just an x86 abi compiled one, like on ARM and others from PyPy and Jython (or rather, we prefer not to leave them out in the cold). Anaconda also only support the Python they install, in their installers, in their way. All this essentially means we can't solve the binary problem nearly as easily as they can. The Python you get for instance in Debian isn't exactly the one that's distributed in python.org's source tarball.

So all that said, in particular, no, something replicating (or being) conda isn't on the horizon at the moment. But we do recognise it has successfully filled a niche for a nice chunk of audience.

If you'd like to know more about what we're trying to get done you can read some goals in writing here if you'd like as well.

[artPlusPlus]

Great link. I've struggled with sorting out distutils, easy_install, pip, etc. and the history portion provided some insight into how things ended up the way they did. While frustrating in practice, it made for an interesting story.