PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain [LWN.net]

PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain

Posted Jan 12, 2023 3:00 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain by koh
Parent article: PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain

> I keep coming back to the question why every language needs their own package manager with the usual set of problems to (a) discover and (b) solve in incompatible manners...

I am less than half joking when I say "blame Perl".

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PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain

Posted Jan 12, 2023 3:14 UTC (Thu) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (1 responses)

Until VERY recently if you wrote PERL code that did this, the dev community would fetch piles of wood and burn you to the ground.

A few years back a VERY common module got re-written and made major changes to the behavior of the code... With no documentation. They just thought it was a "good idea (tm)".

Post hasty, that got changed and while the new behavior WAS a good idea and kept, it became a "turn it on with a variable if you want it" vs "here, let me shove this down your throat".

PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain

Posted Jan 12, 2023 14:36 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I wonder if that is because the Perl community learned the lessons the hard way. I spent way too much time in the late 90's and early 00's fixing 1 am outages to undo some developer's 'grab the latest from CPAN' which 'fixed' whatever bug they had but added 200 new ones in a myriad of dependencies (or my favorite.. why is the perl on each web server or application different? Oh because each team of dev's did a CPAN update and compiled a new version as part of that..) Things became more stable after that... but I also was dealing with perl less and less because various web devs I worked with were finding it 'too stodgy' and moving to Ruby, Python and then Node because speed in module changes were there.

PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain

Posted Jan 12, 2023 15:03 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

In Perl's defense, the modern distribution system didn't exist yet when CPAN started. CPAN was built at more or less the same time as modern distribution packaging systems, so waiting for packages to go up on the distribution wasn't a serious option. Even if people had been willing to wait a few years for that system to develop, nobody knew that it was going to develop, or even that Linux was going to win the Unix wars, so some kind of homebrew packaging system was necessary.

PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain

Posted Jan 12, 2023 17:01 UTC (Thu) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (1 responses)

Which is, ironically, one of the language package managers that is the least painful to integrate into distributions, and one of the languages with the best track of backwards compatibility in modules.

PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain

Posted Jan 22, 2023 9:42 UTC (Sun) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

Perhaps ironical, but not surprising.

I think Perl's growth happened at a time where "fitting in an environment" was the obvious thing to do. One data point? POD has as one of its main targets man pages.

Python (re- [1]) started a trend which I'll call "language monotheism", where each language had (or thought it had) to fight for absolute dominance. I think this might be something for computer sociologists to study some day.

[1] Not the first round, mind you. Older people might remember C vs Pascal, quiche eaters and that. Of course, nowadays, in the era of overabundance, survival and money are more at stake than back then.