Re: Questions regarding Python packaging

[Ryan Prior <ryanprior@hey.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1464 bytes --]


On January 25, 2021, Lars-Dominik Braun <lars@6xq.net> wrote:
> Being able to demote setuptools and pip
> to ordinary packages is merely a side-effect, because they’re not
> essential any more.

I didn't read all of PEP 517, does it deprecate bundling pip with
Python? My understanding was that it just gives maintainers more options
and makes setuptools less of a de-facto standard. I'll read it more
thoroughly later and see if I missed some important info there.

Anyhow, even if a PEP says so, people's expectations to be able to use
pip will not disappear suddenly. It's part of the expected interface to
Python & I imagine removing it has the potential to cause much
confusion.

> Your mail seems to be incomplete, it stopped after:
> > Also, for what it's worth, we already have python-minimal which
> doesn't
> > have pip, and it's only

Ah darn, I'd meant to write it's only a little bit smaller, and I'm
interested to see where we can slim down the Python closure but others
have managed to do so without cutting out pip & setuptools.

All this being said, I'm not a huge fan of pip & setuptools, I like Guix
because it frees me from having to think so much about such things, so I
hope this doesn't come off as a defense of the tools themselves. I mean
to defend the many Python users who have been trained with a certain set
of expectations about the interfaces a Python package provides.

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3816 bytes --]