pip VS flit

Whenever you are working on a Python project that has external dependencies installed with pip, it is strongly recommended to first create a virtual environment.

Unfortunately that feature is easy to break: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/9644

I think I did my part https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/6409

$ sudo pip install y$ sudo pip install yaml WARNING: pip is being invoked by an old script wrapper. This will fail in a future version of pip. Please see https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/5599 for advice on fixing the underlying issue. To avoid this problem you can invoke Python with '-m pip' instead of running pip directly. ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement yaml (from versions: none) ERROR: No matching distribution found for yaml

What are you implying will happen?

Using the build-in tools, you can save the exact versions of dependencies (i.e. a lock file) using "pip freeze >dependencies.txt". This should give you the exact same set of packages in two years' time.

If you want to be even more sure, you can also store hashes in the lock file. This has to be generated by a separate tools at the moment [1][2] but can be consumed by the built-in tools [3], so "pip install -r requirements.txt" is still all you need in two years' time.

[1] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/4732

[2] https://pip-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#using-hashes

[3] https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/topics/secure-installs/#hash-c...

Here’s the issue, https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/11664. I think the idea would be to have some file/json description of environment that could be passed to pip to allow it to fully cross compile. They are open to supporting it just needs contributor to be found to implement it and go through review/discussion.

To be fair the only alternative is fixing Python, and even then you still would have to wait a good 5 years at least for all the old Python versions to dwindle.

It doesn't look like the fixing effort is progressing very quickly: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/8606

To their credit, at least they didn't close it "works as intended" which I imagine a lot of projects would.

Another good benchmark to trying to resolve apache-airflow[all]==1.10.13 using the state of PyPi on 2020-12-02, I give instructions here on how to reproduce that workflow: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/11836. Including a benchmark how how many extra packages your resolver should visit.

Queries on https://github.com/pypa/flit/tree/main/flit_core/flit_core (omitted tests/)

(Pdb) print(indexer.query("def normalize_dist_name(name: str, version: str) -> str:"))

If it's pure Python, the only packaging file you need is `pyproject.toml`. You can fill that file with packaging metadata per PEP 518 and PEP 621, including using modern build tooling like flit[1] for the build backend and build[2] for the frontend.

With that, you entire package build (for all distribution types) should be reducible to `python -m build`. Here's an example of a full project doing everything with just `pyproject.toml`[3] (FD: my project).

[1]: https://github.com/pypa/flit

[2]: https://github.com/pypa/build

[3]: https://github.com/pypa/pip-audit

I published a very simple project flit_pytest_circleci_template that uses: * [flit](https://github.com/pypa/flit) to build a package. * pytest to test it * circleci to run the above and publish the package to pypi whenever a source file is committed. This is the hard part IMO as I do not know circleci well (and didn't know it at all when I started this project).

flit

I hadn't heard of flit, it does seem like it's not brand new on the scene, however it is primarily a single contributor:

https://github.com/takluyver/flit/graphs/contributors

With a title like this, I'd be expecting to see an article describing the latest tools and recommendations from the PyPA.