99% of top Python packages are now wheels(pythonwheels.com) |
99% of top Python packages are now wheels(pythonwheels.com) |
Flakes, pills, wheels, eggs... Come on, people. I am willing to bet good money that it won't hurt you physically if you just call them "packages".
To talk about a different context the BEAM VM (Erlang/Elixir) has "processes". These aren't OS processes but pre-emptively scheduled threads of execution, scheduled by a userspace scheduler onto the available processor cores. They're similar to green threads or fibres in other contexts. They're called "processes" in Erlang because Erlang is old enough that the word process hadn't been implicitly co-opted to mean "OS Process", and it means that whenever I talk about Elixir scheduling I have to insert some version of the above explanation otherwise everyone gets the wrong idea. If they'd called them "florbs" instead, there would be no ambiguity. I still probably have to define the term, but I'm defining it against a universal blank canvas.
Or to put it yet another way "All the good metaphors are already taken"
My point was that calling packages "cheeses" and "wheels" was a conscious decision on the part of the Python community and apparently nobody stopped to think if it does not introduce friction or make them look unprofessional.
As you pointed out, Erlang's "process" moniker came from a long long time ago and they have a good reason for it. Python though? 10 years ago many of these problems were well-understood already.
Again, my argument is against cutesy quirky names. I get you that the generic "package" name carries some assumptions with it but IMO that's the more worthy battle to fight: to make sure everyone understands the same thing when "package" is mentioned.
(EDIT: All that being said, Erlang could have indeed used a quirky name because what they have doesn't seem to have its own term yet. And it doesn't exist anywhere else I think.)
So, "Packages are the new standard of distributing packages, and replace packages" is clearer to you?
This only outlines that the article is very niche and not very interesting to be posted for non-Python audience.
--- ORIGINAL COMMENT:
Need I explain that if you arrive at such a title you would have to reevaluate if it's worth posting at all? Apparently I need to explain it. ;)
This article is more or less pointless anyhow. Using better terminology would have made that clearer much earlier in the process IMO.
vs
"99% of top Fooz packages are lame"
> 99% of top Python packages are now on version 2
But let's be serious, they could have just said "99% of the top Python packages upgraded to our new packaging system" which would be much more informative and interesting title and would make me read it in full, as opposed to now when I just facepalmed.
There is 0 reason why all of this is so unaligned.
Alone how many people maintain packages for different Linux distirs etc.
Maintain it once together and only promote it for your distri when you like it.
Soooo much energy wasted
Allows for standard features like network of trust, signing, search, smart scanning, transformation into distri specific build flows from a meta format, statistics tracking, CDN, unified package API with dependency resolution and/or SDKs for this.
It would also be much much easier to get sponsoring.
But when a language ecosystem opts for cutesy niche names then they just end up confusing everybody, including some of their own users.
"Wheel has an official standard specification. Egg did not. Wheel is a distribution format, i.e a packaging format. 1 Egg was both a distribution format and a runtime installation format (if left zipped), and was designed to be importable.
Wheel archives do not include .pyc files." [1]
There’s probably a blog post somewhere, but Python.org isn’t super helpful when you’re trying to find the equivalent of `cargo run`.
It's been a while since I've first learned python, but pip install came up fairly quickly. At the time, there were no such things as wheels, but when those came, basically nothing changed for me.
> Wheels are the new standard of Python distribution and are intended to replace eggs.
Ahhh... ???
Python is rife with Monty Python references, such as "spam and eggs" in place of "foo and bar", so "egg" was a natural choice.
Probably a reference to Monty Python as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese_Shop_sketch)
In other words, can someone put a line like this into their requirements.txt file?
Why is all the "wheels", "eggs", "PyPi" ... stuff needed then?
https://github.com/iree-org/iree-samples/blob/main/requireme...
You can do even better using GitHub releases: the GET for a releases page with assets (ie use inspector) functions as an index url. So you can have a repo that publishes wheels to a release called eg `latest` that can function as the index for that package/wheel. You can even have multiple repos that publish to a single such wheel repo release repo (using the ncipollo/release-action GHA).
I prefer to use as few technologies as possible. And completely stay away from propriatary technologies.
pip install https://github.com/whalesalad/verisign-namestudio/archive/refs/heads/master.zip
pip install git+https://github.com/whalesalad/verisign-namestudio.gitI think the news here is that there are no packages in the top N that are using an alternate packaging system without using wheel as well. (alternates being msi, exe, or egg)
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/08/01/0150222/pythons-che...
https://web.archive.org/web/20051027102030/http://cheeseshop...
This is the most boring and tedious archetype out there.
eggs and wheels solve binary distribution between other things, so you can install something that requires compilation without having a compiler or the development libraries installed and to avoid bundling files unnecessary during runtime.
pip _can_ compile the code at install-time if your PC has the right build tools -- or it can download pre-built binaries for your host in the form of a "wheel".
pypi has a little more metadata than a git repo, and a place to host version-controlled binaries.
But wheel? It's a wheel of cheese, because pypi used to be called cheeseshop? I mean sure, but doesn't it feel a bit like that 20-year-old tatoo that you got during your teens that you got mixed feelings about today?
My suggestion: Call them pypacks -- extension: .pyp
Though I suppose people already struggle to keep pip vs pip3 vs pip3.9 vs pip3.10 vs pip3.${n} vs pipx vs pipenv straight.
Jokes aside, I feel like the names on python are no more terrible than what Java does.
That's exactly how I view all these "quirky" names btw.
How about "99% of the top Python packages don't require being compiled to install them".
That's one of the biggest wins of wheels. They have pre-compiled binaries for all supported platforms of that package. This typically applies to Python packages that have C dependencies.
The confidence of some HN commentators never ceases to surprise me
It serves only as a further confusion. But yeah, Python is notorious for its numerous (and likely all sub-optimal) approaches to packaging.
It's not such a stretch to want to understand things quicker as an outsider and be annoyed by a seeming gatekeeping via quirky witty terminology.
Not sure why you used such a conflicting tone as an opposition of that -- I think, fairly reasonable -- stance.