Show HN: Combo, the Simple Python Package Manager

Show HN: Combo, the Simple Python Package Manager(github.com)

15 points by wkcamp 10 years ago | 6 comments

kennydude 10 years ago |

In my experience pip has always worked quite well.

About the only thing I would like to see from it is making it a bit easier to use, for example something like `npm install --save something` instead of having to tell people about `pip freeze` and venvs etc

wkcamp 10 years ago |

To those who look at this, this is my first "official" Python project. I really need help with test suites and whatever. But alas, the package manager works well enough. All feedback is appreciated.

svisser 10 years ago |

Package management is a hard problem; I'd much rather see efforts to improve pip instead of fragmenting any efforts to improve what pip already does.

sauere 10 years ago |

I don't want to sound like a dick, but: why?

pip is damn fine.

nilliams 10 years ago | |

Pip is not fine. Pip doesn't resolve dependencies [0]. It also has no way to sensibly manage the 'semver during development, frozen versions in production' needs of modern development, that both Ruby's Bundler and Node's npm take care of. Those are, in my opinion the 2 biggest requirements of a package manager for non-trivial projects, and it totally fails to handle them.

Here's a post on the latter issue by the developer of pip-tools which aims to solve that problem (I've not tried it yet, but my team is considering it): [1]

[0] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/988

[1] http://nvie.com/posts/better-package-management/

wkcamp 10 years ago | |

It's all good. So in my experience, I had issues getting my development environment up to speed at work. We had dependency files, but weren't well maintained. I made Combo so that a Dev-team could easily share a file with other workers and bring their engineers' dev environments up to speed in a few minutes. Furthermore, open source projects could distribute their "Combofiles" with ease, grow their contributor base, and focus more on development than menial issues.

Besides, the main goal of Combo is to eventually join "pip" or take on all the capabilities of pip.