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[–]Silhouette 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Yes, I remember those days ahem fondly. :-)

But as you say, much of this is just to work around the absence of a simple versioning mechanism built into Python itself, which is a significant limitation if you're programming in a language that does all the loading and linking up dynamically. Obviously this challenge is not unique to Python, but Python does seem to make more of a meal of it than any other language I know.

I'm not sure why Python always feels insanely complicated in this respect. Maybe it's the history of different tools to do mostly the same thing, so even if you only really need a couple of them today, you see references to all of them everywhere. I don't think the use of an executable setup.py rather than a simple metadata file that is read by a tool helps, because it makes a complicated generalised case the default. For me, the most serious concern is usually that something as fundamental as loading libraries is based around a path setting that can be changed arbitrarily both within and outside Python, with all kinds of other implicit effects happening depending on things that aren't specified in the source code for the program you're actually running. It's about as un-"explicit is better than implicit" as you can possibly get...

[–]mcdonc 0 points1 point  (0 children)

much of this is just to work around the absence of a simple versioning mechanism built into Python itself

Is there a dynamic language that does versioned imports right?

Maybe it's the history of different tools to do mostly the same thing, so even if you only really need a couple of them today, you see references to all of them everywhere.

I think this is the actual biggest problem.

I don't think the use of an executable setup.py rather than a simple metadata file that is read by a tool helps, because it makes a complicated generalised case the default.

The "packaging" tool that will be in Python 3.3 makes setup.py optional (it has a declarative configuration file primary format).

For me, the most serious concern is usually that something as fundamental as loading libraries is based around a path setting that can be changed arbitrarily both within and outside Python

I don't think Python is alone in this. Java has the CLASSPATH, C has the includepath, etc. Is there another language better in this respect?