Courtès: What's in a package [LWN.net]

Courtès: What's in a package

Posted Sep 23, 2021 7:02 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958)
Parent article: Courtès: What's in a package

If pypi was curated and would drop packages that do this thing, the developers wouldn't distribute in this way.

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Courtès: What's in a package

Posted Sep 23, 2021 7:41 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah, they'd just put a curl ... | bash ... command on their website...

Courtès: What's in a package

Posted Sep 23, 2021 9:43 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

But not being installable as a normal library… It would be much more rare for it to be used as a dependency.

Courtès: What's in a package

Posted Sep 23, 2021 12:18 UTC (Thu) by t-v (guest, #112111) [Link]

Have you used it (or the most obvious comparison point, tensorflow) much?

Similar to what NAR suggests, is that my impression from hanging out on the PyTorch forums is that most people pick whatever version they want and then copy-paste whatever

https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/

tells them to.
Personally, I doubt that people have PyTorch installed automatically through dependencies that much, it would be hit-or-miss if it works with their hardware etc.

From the forums it looks like people are using conda a lot with PyTorch, I don't know if there is a way to distinguish CI-based downloads from human ones in PyPI.

Courtès: What's in a package

Posted Sep 23, 2021 13:00 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

PyPI requiring auditwheel-ok packages that don't depend on anything not in the wheel is a lot of the problem (IME). There's no way for my C++ project that uses HDF5 to use the copy that comes with h5py. Even if there was, how do I make sure I get a *compatible* dependency link at `pip install` time? Multiply this out for umpteen C++ -> {C, C++} dependencies with varying qualities of Python wrappers (e.g., which Qt binding to use when all I need is the C++ API?). Cross-language support where the internal API boundaries matter is where single-language package managers (including cargo) really fall down. For this kind of stuff, I think that `conda` is really the way to go because it actually understands that not everything that is in Python is pure Python. Alas, `pip install` is what everyone asks for…