30 years later I still love programming but people given authority opting for cutesy names for critically important terms in the ecosystem should be severely limited in their options.
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".
I get the issues, but using a fresh name that doesn't have pre-conceptions is often the better idea. If I call something a "package" people will have an immediate understanding of what "package" means, but it will be several slightly different understandings and that can cause quite subtle issues with learning and understanding.
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"
As a guy who made a career out of Elixir (7 years now, though I have mixed and matched that with quite a bit of Rust and some Golang) I could not agree more on the confusing "process" moniker.
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.)
Which would make the article completely redundant, and that works for me. :D
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.
You're completely right. The site doesn't even bother to explain what "eggs" are. And while it lists the benefits of wheels, there is no word about the apparent downsides of eggs, or maybe a little comparison table.
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.
"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.
Wheels are more akin to crates, so you'd be looking for cargo add -> pip install.
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.
Packages are a language-level concept in Python. A package may be a collection of source files on the filesystem, it's still a package, except that doesn't lend itself well to distribution. Moreover, from the language standpoint, the usage of a package (like "import numpy") is the same on all architectures, but the files needed for distribution (native extension module binaries) may differ.
Python is rife with Monty Python references, such as "spam and eggs" in place of "foo and bar", so "egg" was a natural choice.
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).
The three that are not wheels are distributed as source tarballs only -- one is AWS Sagemaker that looks like it uses a bunch of native code, one is Apache Spark, and one is futures.
I 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)
Readit News
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.
https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/glossary/
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]
[1] https://packaging.python.org/discussions/wheel-vs-egg/
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?
https://somewhere.com/some/git/repo.git
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.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
I 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)