Entries published on December 15, 2008
Why I like pip
So yesterday I explained some of the reasons why I don’t like setuptools. In essence, my objections boil down to one idea: application packaging and application development should be orthogonal concerns. The way setuptools works, however, seems to tend, inevitably, toward coupling them to each other. I gave one example — the way the default behavior of installing zipped packages (an ironic twist: the man who so eloquently explained how Python is not Java has spent so much time and effort trying to implement Java packaging conventions in Python) leads to a need to use specialized, non-standard, packaging-system-specific APIs to access things like data files — and mentioned that, unfortunately, this is only one example of how use of setuptools ends up changing application code to deal with packaging concerns.
By way of a lead-in, I mentioned that Debian and various Ruby folks are at each other’s throats right …