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99% of top Python packages are now wheels

pythonwheels.com

51–60 of 79 posts

Re: 99% of top Python packages are now wheels

#51
post #4

30 years later I still love programming but people given authority opting for cutesy names for critically important terms in the ecosystem should be severely limited in their options. Flakes, pills, wheels, eggs... Come on, people. I am willing to bet good money that it won't hurt you physically if you just call them "packages".

We are not even able to align all of this shit in one great platform. There is 0 reason why all of this is so unaligned. Alone how many people maintain packages for different Linux distirs etc. Maintain it once together and only promote it for your distri when you like it. Soooo much energy wasted

Imagine PackageHub:

Allows for standard features like network of trust, signing, search, smart scanning, transformation into distri specific build flows from a meta format, statistics tracking, CDN, unified package API with dependency resolution and/or SDKs for this.

It would also be much much easier to get sponsoring.

Re: 99% of top Python packages are now wheels

#52
post #4

30 years later I still love programming but people given authority opting for cutesy names for critically important terms in the ecosystem should be severely limited in their options. Flakes, pills, wheels, eggs... Come on, people. I am willing to bet good money that it won't hurt you physically if you just call them "packages".

This is, other than the fact it violates UNIX principles, my biggest issue with Homebrew.

Which UNIX principles do you believe it violates?

Re: 99% of top Python packages are now wheels

#53
post #29
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can do this: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/topics/vcs-support/

That is pretty awesome! Why is all the "wheels", "eggs", "PyPi" ... stuff needed then?

pypi is needed because those personal webservers will inevitably go down. why not github? well, it didn’t use to exist before pypi and it microsoft may still pull a good one

eggs and wheels solve binary distribution between other things, so you can install something that requires compilation without having a compiler or the development libraries installed and to avoid bundling files unnecessary during runtime.

Re: 99% of top Python packages are now wheels

#54
post #29
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can do this: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/topics/vcs-support/

That is pretty awesome! Why is all the "wheels", "eggs", "PyPi" ... stuff needed then?

a lot of Python packages contain parts written in native code (often C or Rust) for performance reasons.

pip _can_ compile the code at install-time if your PC has the right build tools -- or it can download pre-built binaries for your host in the form of a "wheel".

pypi has a little more metadata than a git repo, and a place to host version-controlled binaries.

Re: 99% of top Python packages are now wheels

#55
post #19

Is it possible to publish Python code for others to use simply by putting a repo on a webserver? In other words, can someone put a line like this into their requirements.txt file? https://somewhere.com/some/git/repo.git

you can install a package straight from Github:

    pip install https://github.com/whalesalad/verisign-namestudio/archive/refs/heads/master.zip
or from the git repo:

    pip install git+https://github.com/whalesalad/verisign-namestudio.git

Re: 99% of top Python packages are now wheels

#56
post #20
post #4

30 years later I still love programming but people given authority opting for cutesy names for critically important terms in the ecosystem should be severely limited in their options. Flakes, pills, wheels, eggs... Come on, people. I am willing to bet good money that it won't hurt you physically if you just call them "packages".

> I am willing to bet good money that it won't hurt you physically if you just call them "packages". So, "Packages are the new standard of distributing packages, and replace packages" is clearer to you?

To consider that the only option is rather reductionist. For example, simply add a version, and to use the original title instead of inventing one:

> 99% of top Python packages are now on version 2

Re: 99% of top Python packages are now wheels

#57
post #29
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can do this: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/topics/vcs-support/

That is pretty awesome! Why is all the "wheels", "eggs", "PyPi" ... stuff needed then?

Because so much Python code binds to C extensions that you will need to compile for the correct platform. For instance the new version of Pydantic is now backed by Rust. To avoid everyone having to compile the rust code on their platform, you can upload it pre-compiled for linux, windows etc.

Re: 99% of top Python packages are now wheels

#58
post #4

30 years later I still love programming but people given authority opting for cutesy names for critically important terms in the ecosystem should be severely limited in their options. Flakes, pills, wheels, eggs... Come on, people. I am willing to bet good money that it won't hurt you physically if you just call them "packages".

I get the issues, but using a fresh name that doesn't have pre-conceptions is often the better idea. If I call something a "package" people will have an immediate understanding of what "package" means, but it will be several slightly different understandings and that can cause quite subtle issues with learning and understanding.

To talk about a different context the BEAM VM (Erlang/Elixir) has "processes". These aren't OS processes but pre-emptively scheduled threads of execution, scheduled by a userspace scheduler onto the available processor cores. They're similar to green threads or fibres in other contexts. They're called "processes" in Erlang because Erlang is old enough that the word process hadn't been implicitly co-opted to mean "OS Process", and it means that whenever I talk about Elixir scheduling I have to insert some version of the above explanation otherwise everyone gets the wrong idea. If they'd called them "florbs" instead, there would be no ambiguity. I still probably have to define the term, but I'm defining it against a universal blank canvas.

Or to put it yet another way "All the good metaphors are already taken"

Re: 99% of top Python packages are now wheels

#60
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am willing to bet good money that it won't hurt you physically if you just call them "packages". So, "Packages are the new standard of distributing packages, and replace packages" is clearer to you?

EDIT: Reduced my original comment to this: This only outlines that the article is very niche and not very interesting to be posted for non-Python audience. --- ORIGINAL COMMENT: Need I explain that if you arrive at such a title you would have to reevaluate if it's worth posting at all? Apparently I need to explain it. ;) This article is more or less pointless anyhow. Using better terminology would have made that clea…

This "article" is a 10+ year-old website that's been tracking an ecosystem-wide migration from one style of preparing python code for distribution to another, more robust style of preparation.
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