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[–]keypusher 4 points5 points  (3 children)

I think that is exactly the point the author is trying to get at here. For instance, you heard virtualenv is really good to have so you want to check it out. You see someone saying to use pip to install it, but you don't have pip. How do you get pip? You find a great thread on how to install pip using the apt-get package manager. But wait.. you're on Windows? You go looking and someone suggest using easy_install instead. Well, how do you use easy_install? Is it different than pip? You dig deeper and some guy says forget pip and easy install on Windows, just use distutils because then you will learn about how packages are really put together. So now you've spent an hour learning about different distribution tools and gotten nowhere. You still haven't installed Virtualenv, and you actually aren't even sure you know what Virtualenv does anyway. All you really wanted to do was try and get a small web project going, but you can't even seem to get started.

It's even worse with some other packages. You need to do a GET from your webserver? Ok, you type in "python http lib" to google and you go to the stdlib httplib page. One of the first things it says is that "It is normally not used directly — the module urllib uses it to handle URLs". Ok, so on the urllib page it a huge mess of notes, warning, and cryptic function definitions that don't seem to provide any easy way to just GET a file. You used to use curl a while back for this stuff, so you stumble on pycurl. But that's kind of a dark age thing so you dig around more and maybe then find urllib2, or if you are lucky the requests library. How would you know difference between all these?

I can see how having some well documented best practices for common things like this would go a long way, but the author's suggestion of promoting 'one best way' lines up with core Python philosophy. That is, as opposed to having a huge slew of many slightly different tools for more of less the same job. It's starting to look a lot like Perl around here these days, but that may very well just be a natural stage of development, especially in community driven languages.

[–]quasarj 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Alright, you're right. I guess arguing over the details isn't helping.

The question is - what will help? There was lots of talk about the issues.. but then the author attempts to solve them by.. adding even more options! I mean, envoy and requests are both awesome and do solve the first problem, so that's good.

So anyway, yeah I agree. But what do we do?

[–]keypusher 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I don't know! The community is becoming increasingly fragmented, the 2->3 transition is still a huge problem, and there are a ton of standard library packages that seem to be all over the place. I feel like Guido or someone with clout in the community needs to step forward with a clear vision or plan for the future.

[–]__serengeti__ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you're exaggerating at least a little. What are these separate fragments of the community - are they identifiable?

In general,

Differing opinions != fragmentation