What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml? • Hacker News Board

Re: What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?

#161

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

lapnitnelav wrote: post #159

pjmlp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, so Python is for small and slow, doesn't seem to be the best in everything after all. Which brings us back to "nice scripting and introduction to programming language".

When the overwhelming majority of computer users will probably struggle with something a bit more complex than a Hello World type project, nice scripting and introduction to programming is light-years ahead of every body else. This is no small feat. Also the ecosystem of libraries is the same. You can't see that from your ivory tower but those things matter a lot to people on the ground. Don't let you prejudice get i…

Basic did it first, including the structured programming variants like QBasic and Turbo Basic.

I see that from my historical experience.

Also we are moving goal posts here, I was quite explicit that Python is a good language for teaching programming.

What I am against is portraying as the one Language above anything else.

Re: What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?

#162

Post by jshen » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 3:48 PM UTC

Hamuko wrote: post #90

jshen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Node does it better as well. So does java with maven which has been the dominant way to do it in java for over a decade.

I would not use Node as an example of good packaging. It really hasn't been that long since left-pad. Then there's the fact that you still have multiple different tools to do the same thing (npm vs. yarn) and the end result node_modules/ is a fucking mess anyways. find node_modules/ -name "node_modules" | wc -l 327

That’s a different issue than the one we’re talking about here.

Re: What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?

#163

Post by brettcannon » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

takluyver wrote: post #107

no_wizard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense, on its face, as to why they don't have a business arm, at least currently. One thing I would suggest, on its face, is that any time someone has to reach you (as in, the foundation, not you specifically), that introduces friction, even the smallest amount of it, can leave lost donations on the table. If there was a simple page even, that said something like Do you have a feature you need implemented…

> For a simple donation, we can prioritize the work you need... I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure a non-profit can't do things like this. If the person giving the money expects a tangible benefit in return, it's not a donation.

The specific restriction from my understanding is that a US non-profit that accepts money for a specific thing must spend every penny of that money only on that thing. So if the PSF was given $1,000,000 to solve a specific problem and while trying to do it they go bankrupt they still couldn't touch that money to stay afloat. So non-profits avoid that situation since they typically have enough to survive a year or so, but not enough to be able to restrict what they might need to do with their cash.

Re: What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?

#164

Post by toyg » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

keymone wrote: post #139

takluyver wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For instance, in the scientific computing world, compiled extensions are hugely important, whereas they're relatively rare in web development. There's probably no logical reason why a single common package manager for these domains is impossible. But they have different priorities, and people write tools that solve their own problems. Who is going to decide which package managers are unnecessary, and convince all of…

> relatively rare in web development not at all. from my previous experience with ruby i was using gems with compiled bindings to libraries for: mysql, memcached, json, xml, regexp and http. and probably some more i don't recall right now.

Python does all of that and more. There are still occasional issues with the thorniest setups, but binary wheels absolutely took care of the average case. You even get a massive desktop toolkit luke QT with a simple “pip install pyqt”.

Getting there might not be the nicest experience, but most packages nowadays can and do get there.

Re: What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?

#165

Post by toyg » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

jshen wrote: post #83

toyg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby serves one ecosystem (web), barely. Python serves several huge ones: web, datascience, 3d graphics, sysadmin... all with different needs, different conventions, different “standard” tools to do this and that. The community is orders of magnitude bigger than ruby by now, and anything that requires coordination is much harder to accomplish than in a lot of other ecosystems. Python is now on par with ecosystems lik…

Node does it better as well. So does java with maven which has been the dominant way to do it in java for over a decade.

Maven is “so good” that people wrote another tool on top (Gradle) so they don’t have to touch the Mavenstrosity. More or less like Maven was built to get rid of that other nightmare, Ant.

Re: What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?

#166

Post by j0057 » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

earthboundkid wrote: post #156

j0057 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, surprising and unhelpful are value judgements on your part. It could be a security feature to someone else! The hidden (not deleted) comments are hidden not because they contain criticism, but because of an unnecessarily harsh tone, which is unhelpful to anyone wanting to read up on the discussion at hand, and definitely not helpful for the motivation of anybody currently doing the unthankful work of maintaini…

> The hidden (not deleted) comments are hidden not because they contain criticism, but because of an unnecessarily harsh tone, which is unhelpful to anyone wanting to read up on the discussion at hand, and definitely not helpful for the motivation of anybody currently doing the unthankful work of maintaining pip. I reread the thread last night and asked, Was I too harsh? Am I discouraging the thankless pip team? Obvi…

Well, at your use of the term 'gaslighting' I kind of like to quietly step out of saying, OK, whatever, this discussion has become especially unproductive.

Re: What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?

#167

Post by Supermancho » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

mixmastamyk wrote: post #102

Supermancho wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvotes because of what I think about the language. Zealotry at it's finest.

Welcome to HN. They aren't interested in your flippant opinions, man.

The opinions are serious on both sides. If I don't provide criticism, it's a strawman post. Everyone is wrong in criticism here, except when the specific topic is criticism and for that, we get tons of noise about Python. At the same time, it's not a open forum when one side is persecuted.

Re: What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?

#168

Post by aprdm » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #108

toyg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby serves one ecosystem (web), barely. Python serves several huge ones: web, datascience, 3d graphics, sysadmin... all with different needs, different conventions, different “standard” tools to do this and that. The community is orders of magnitude bigger than ruby by now, and anything that requires coordination is much harder to accomplish than in a lot of other ecosystems. Python is now on par with ecosystems lik…

> Python serves several huge ones: web, datascience, 3d graphics, sysadmin... all with different needs, different conventions, different “standard” tools to do this and that. Them having different conventions and standard tools is the failure, not a constraint. What are the different needs that these ecosystems have which mean they couldn't use a common package manager? I don't believe there are any.

Working in 3D graphics there are lots of different constraints unfortunately and it isn't an easy solution.

A lot of 3d graphics houses have to roll their own solution.

This is a famous one in the cycle and a common approach-> https://github.com/nerdvegas/rez

The issue is that the environment varies a lot and there's usually a lot of C++ code that needs to be compiled to interact with the python plugins based on different environments with 500+ libraries mixing & matching...

Re: What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?

#169

Post by chc » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

jshen wrote: post #45

chc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poetry is...a little quirky. I've seen it go into infinite loops trying to resolve projects with, like, 10 dependencies. I'm not really sold on it being better than just making a virtualenv and pip installing.

How do other people replicate your venv? How does production replicate your venv?

Sorry, I was a little terse — obviously you're right that you're not going to ship the virtualenv itself. As other people have said, the intent was that you create a requirements file (and/or maybe a setup.py if you need that functionality). What I meant is that between fiddliness and sluggishness of Poetry, and the marginal hassle of maintaining a requirements file and creating your own virtualenvs, I'm not sure Poetry is the clear winner at the moment.

Re: What the Heck Is Pyproject.toml?

#170

Post by brettcannon » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #141

takluyver wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For instance, in the scientific computing world, compiled extensions are hugely important, whereas they're relatively rare in web development. There's probably no logical reason why a single common package manager for these domains is impossible. But they have different priorities, and people write tools that solve their own problems. Who is going to decide which package managers are unnecessary, and convince all of…

NPM has excellent support for compiled extensions, despite being mostly used for web development.

I think something people are forgetting when comparing Python's packaging system to other languages and runtimes is how old Python and its ecosystem is. For instance, Python's public release predates Linux's public release(Feb 1991 versus Aug 1991). The first release of setuptools was 2004 and it isn't like people weren't sharing Python code even before then (https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/commit/8423e1ed14ac1691c2...). That's over 5 years before npm was released (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_(software)). That means npm got to learn from Python and any other project that predated it. It also means they didn't have Python's momentum to contend with (I certainly never expected Python to become _this_ popular, and that makes it very hard to change as you literally have tens of millions of people to re-educate when you change something).

So while it's fine to say you wished Python's packaging approach was as good as another languages, please do so know that it is not fair to say that if one community got something to work for their needs it means Python should have been able to as well; it's not an apples-to-apples comparison considering the trees were quite possibly planted at different times and are different varietals.