PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain

Posted Jan 12, 2023 12:19 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
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...

Because Gentoo is not macOS or Windows, basically.

Newbies to the programming would, inevitably, use one of these two. And if your language doesn't support them well then it's chances of being used in place of more popular alternative is almost null.

And if you have something that works for beginners… people continue to use it for other things, because why not?

PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain

Posted Jan 12, 2023 20:14 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

I started using gentoo precisely because I needed features that were not available in the latest version of my then distro (SUSE). I could have used the project's own install setup, but I would rather use the distro, so I changed to one that made it easy.

However, I wouldn't recommend gentoo to newbies ... (unless, of course, they want to do things the hard way :-)

Cheers,
Wol

PyTorch and the PyPI supply chain

Posted Jan 12, 2023 21:19 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The problem if distros is not technical, ultimately, it's social.

Most distro makers drank too much FSF kool aid and now believe others want to create sources for others to use.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Neither users nor developers are interested in the software for software sake.

Their goal is to produce binary and to either give it away or use it.

That's why disconnect is so deep.

In a world where creation of software source is the goal you have to support various versions of dependencies (because this increases usability of your sources) and then, on top of that, you can afford “curated repos”, then, on top of that, you can provide “long term support” and all these other things.

In a world where software source only exists because it's not very convenient to write in machine code directly… situation is radically different: developers assume that they would decide what dependencies they would use and what targets they would support and users decide they would decide what version of application they would download and use.

Given insane disconnect between expectations it's no wonder no one is happy.

Gentoo, NixOS and other such distros support that mode, but they make assumption that this desire to control everything goes to the core… but most developers and users don't go that far: they are ~~happy to use OS that hardware maker gives them~~ too scared to replace OS that hardware maker gives to them, they want to control things on top of that.

Maybe if Gentoo or Nix supported macOS and Windows this would have been an acceptable compromise, but alas, they don't do that (at least they don't make it easy enough to use for newbie), thus we have no alternative to per-language package managers.