It’s unfortunate that it’s third party, but conda has the unquestionable advantage of being the only Python-centric packaging system that has a reasonable shared binary library story
I'm curious, do you not find wheels + manylinux reasonable? I agree that until recently, Conda definitely had that advantage, but now that you can `pip install scipy` and have that get you a working library and not try to compile things on your machine what does Conda offer beyond that?
I guess one thing Conda has that the pip ecosystem doesn't is that it supports installing non-Python shared libraries like libcurl on their own. Is that an advantage? (We absolutely could replicate that in the pip ecosystem if that was worth doing, and it's even not totally unprecedented to have non-Python binaries on PyPI.)
I think it would definitely be great if pip could install non-python dependencies. One problem right now is that many projects will tell you to just pip install xyz. You execute that, things start building, and the process fails partway with some cryptic message because you're missing an external dependency. You figure out which one, you install it, start again, and another dependency is missing. Rinse and repeat. It's definitely not a turnkey solution, and this issue trips up newcomers all the time.
With respect to versioning, I think pip should be way more strict. It should force you to freeze dependency versions before uploading to pipy, not accept "libxyz > 3.5", but require a fixed range or single version. That would make packages much less likely to break later because newer versions of their dependencies don't work the same way anymore.
Does pip allow version number dependencies? Conda is able to upgrade/downgrade packages to resolve conflicts, whereas pip just seems to check if a package exists and shrugs when there's a version conflict.
geofft|6 years ago
I guess one thing Conda has that the pip ecosystem doesn't is that it supports installing non-Python shared libraries like libcurl on their own. Is that an advantage? (We absolutely could replicate that in the pip ecosystem if that was worth doing, and it's even not totally unprecedented to have non-Python binaries on PyPI.)
tachyonbeam|6 years ago
With respect to versioning, I think pip should be way more strict. It should force you to freeze dependency versions before uploading to pipy, not accept "libxyz > 3.5", but require a fixed range or single version. That would make packages much less likely to break later because newer versions of their dependencies don't work the same way anymore.
jbay808|6 years ago