I appreciate everything they’ve done but the group which maintains Pip and the package index is categorically incapable of shipping anything at a good velocity.
It’s entirely volunteer based so I don’t blame them, but the reality is that it’s holding back the ecosystem.
I suspect it’s also a misalignment of interests. No one there really invests in improving UX.
> the group which maintains Pip and the package index is categorically incapable of shipping anything at a good velocity.
> It’s entirely volunteer based so I don’t blame them
It's not just that they're volunteers; it's the legacy codebase they're stuck with, and the use cases that people will expect them to continue supporting.
> I suspect it’s also a misalignment of interests. No one there really invests in improving UX.
"Invest" is the operative word here. When I read discussions in the community around tools like pip, a common theme is that the developers don't consider themselves competent to redesign the UX, and there is no money from anywhere to hire someone who would be. The PSF operates on an annual budget on the order of $4 million, and a big chunk of that is taken up by PyCon, supporting programs like PyLadies, generic marketing efforts, etc. Meanwhile, total bandwidth use at PyPI has crossed into the exabyte range (it was ~600 petabytes in 2023 and growing rapidly). They would be completely screwed without Fastly's incredible in-kind donation.
Indeed, they broke a few features in the last few years and made the excuse "we can't support them, we're volunteers." Well, how about stop breaking things that worked for a decade? That would take less effort.
They had time to force "--break-system-packages" on us though, something no one asked for.
> how about stop breaking things that worked for a decade?
They aren't doing this.
> They had time to force "--break-system-packages" on us though, something no one asked for.
The maintainers of several Linux distros asked for it very explicitly, and cooperated to design the feature. The rationale is extensively documented in the proposal (https://peps.python.org/pep-0668/). This is especially important for distros where the system package manager is itself implemented in Python, since corrupting the system Python environment could produce a state that is effectively unrecoverable (at least without detailed Python-specific know-how).
Was being a facetious, sure someone asked for it, but it was pretty dumb. This has never "corrupted" anything, is rare (not happened to me in last 15 years), and simply fixed when knowledgeable.
Not everyone can simply fix it, so a better solution would be to isolate the system python, allow more than one installed, etc.
Distros already do this to some extent.
It’s entirely volunteer based so I don’t blame them, but the reality is that it’s holding back the ecosystem.
I suspect it’s also a misalignment of interests. No one there really invests in improving UX.