Hidden build warnings? [LWN.net]

Hidden build warnings?

Posted May 22, 2025 13:54 UTC (Thu) by zahlman (guest, #175387)
In reply to: Hidden build warnings? by marcH
Parent article: Recent disruptive changes from Setuptools

The warnings would mostly be shown to people who didn't necessarily even *expect that a build would take place*. Pip doesn't warn in advance that it's going to install from an sdist, because it doesn't know in advance that it might have to (in order to satisfy dependency version constraints).

You may also be interested in https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/9140 .

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Hidden build warnings?

Posted May 22, 2025 20:01 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> The warnings would mostly be shown to people who didn't necessarily even *expect that a build would take place*.

Darn.

I think these build warnings should still be shown. In fact, pip should not even try to hide the difference between building something and not building anything; why would it do that? User interface always matters but "pip install" is not something "consumers" are expected to use, it's not an iPhone that should pretend that everything is fine when some glitch happens.

Also, it's incredibly hard to deprecate anything. A very reasonable amount of "spamming" end-users can only help.

Googling error messages and warnings is the most useful ever, everyone does it all the time. Don't prevent that.

Just stop hiding stuff already. Ignoring logs is easy, everyone does it ALL THE TIME. Digging out useful warnings buried in obscure log files with unknown names or behind obscure --debug-whatever option is the most time-consuming and horrific user experience ever.

> You may also be interested in https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/9140 .

I'm not interested because I wrote "dear Lazyweb" :-D
Also, Python packaging looks like something where you can too easily lose... mental health points. A bit disappointed for a scripted language but what do I know (not much).

OK, I read the description of 9140 and I think I agree with it. I upvoted it.