[brettcannon]

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.

[twic]

The age also means Python has had plenty of time to come up with something new!

[brettcannon]

I'm not sure how old you are, but if you don't know the name "Borland" you might not realize how novel it is to have a compiler on every major OS. While Python's age means it has been around to see a lot of changes occur, that also means it had pre-existing practices and code to also consider whenever a shift in the industry occurred. Plus in hindsight things look obvious, but during the transition it isn't obvious what will stick and what won't.

It's pretty remarkable that things have continued to function since my 17 years with Python alone have seen things like:

- Compilers becoming available on all OSs - Linux becoming a thing - Laptops becoming common - Smartphones - Web-based email clients

As I have said a few times in comments on this thread, it's fine to feel like there's room for improvement, but trying to "stick it" to Python and its packaging ecosystem in some way for not being perfect is pointless for you and demotivating for those who are actually in a position to try to make things better for you (and even if you aren't a Python user you should care to some extent about it as Instagram runs on Python and thus it is helping to deliver you those cat photos while you're stuck at home ).

[takluyver]

People in the Python ecosystem have come up with plenty of new things over the years - eggs, wheels, conda, poetry... Coming up with something new is the easy bit. Getting everyone to agree that a new thing is better and stop using/recommending other things is much harder - almost impossible, if those other things serve some use cases fairly well.

The fragmented ecosystem is one of the main complaints about Python packaging today. And that's really tricky, because the main way the open source world knows to solve problems is to create new tools, and that doesn't help when the problem is 'too many tools'.

[BerislavLopac]

And it (and by "it" I mean the Python community) absolutely did! The main problem that it has come up with numerous different somethings that have been competing to become standards, across a wide range of related, but separate areas (packaging, versioning, environments...), and only a few of them (like pip) managed to become partial (but not at all universal) de facto standards.