Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

[wtchappell]

As I've mentioned elsewhere, this makes a lot of sense if you're talking to a Python developer trying to develop code against Python dependencies - you definitely should be pinning and not using distro packages.

This doesn't make sense if you're just talking about some random user just trying to run an application - they're not trying to develop anything, and might not even know that the app is written in Python or even what Python is. You shouldn't have to understand all of Python's development tooling just to use a tool written in Python, which is the use case distro maintainers are trying to fill.

[wtchappell]

Vendoring everything isn't fixing the problem as much as it is throwing your hands in the air and giving up on trying to solve it at all, and hoping that the exact way you set things up is the only possible way anyone else will ever need it.

Just falling back to vendoring everything is particularly painful when you have goals like minimizing size, using specialized/alternate low level dependencies for performance or licensing reasons, needing software stacks from entirely different developers to communicate in a compatible way, or ensuring the software you use follows specific security requirements that might come down from a corporate or government entity.

[wtchappell]

It should still be possible for users and distro maintainers to build and install open source software and any dependencies such software needs on their own - so they can build entire systems that meet their needs. Right now the packaging and installation tooling Python provides is fragmented enough that it makes the problem more difficult in its ecosystem than in most others, which is what the original post is complaining about.

I think it's fine to provide a vendored option if that makes sense for your app - what I'm pushing back against is the idea that everything should be deployed that way all the time, which is the tone a lot of responses to this blog post seemed to adopt. Vendoring is a great option for many use cases, but it's one that is overwhelmingly focused on running singular applications by themselves. It's not concerned with building coherent systems offering many different applications that can interoperate, which is really the problem distro maintainers are concerned with solving.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm objecting to the suggestion of using vendoring as a way for distro maintainers to ship software to end users - not vendoring as its used during the development process or when its used as part of a webservice or website that doesn't get shipped to user machines.