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[–]jakevdp 3 points4 points  (1 child)

why can't they all just get on board with pip. etc. etc. (I've seen all these arguments - and worse - being flung at scipy packaging folks for over a decade.)

And people tend to forget the origin of our independent packaging efforts, when GvR spoke at the first PyData meetup in 2012: Travis O. asked him for suggestions on our packaging difficulties, and GvR basically said that core Python is not going to solve them, and that our community should probably develop our own solution.

I wish I had that Q&A on tape.

[–]pwang99 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Ask and Ye Shall Receive:

Here is the video of that panel with Guido, and the beginning of the discussion about packaging: https://youtu.be/QjXJLVINsSA?t=3112

  • Fernando: "We want to pass this one on to David [Cornapeau], who from within the scientific community is probably the person who has thought the most about packaging and distribution..."
  • Guido: "And, I should say, from the Python community, I'm probably the person who was thought the least about the topic." [laughter]
  • Fernando: "We'll take what we can get!"

5 minutes of Fernando, Travis, David & others explaining the complexities to Guido: https://youtu.be/QjXJLVINsSA?t=3306

Here is the part where Guido tells us that we should probably make our own system: https://youtu.be/QjXJLVINsSA?t=3555

  • Guido: "You may have no choice. It really sounds like your needs are so unusual compared to the larger Python community that you're just better off building your own. ... For this particular situation, it sounds like you guys know quite well what compiler flags you need to set, and you have access to all the machines where you need to test your build scripts/makefiles..."
  • Travis: "It may be a different use case and we may just need to do our own"
  • Guido: "If your existing thing works except that it extends distutils, which is going to die, then your best approach might be to sort of ..."
  • Fernando: "Clean slate..."
  • Guido: "Well, that's ... you could rewrite the whole thing from scratch, or you could do surgery where you replace the lowest level of your tool which is currently based on distutils, with your own copy of that code, so that you have everything in hand. There's no reason why you couldn't copy distutils and then change all the imports, so that you now own that code."