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<PurpleSym>Standing knee-deep in dependencies of dependencies myself I wonder what we can do about that. Perhaps the Docker faction is right and traditional distributions are dead, because they simply cannot (with reasonable effort) provide a coherent set of packages any more.

<PurpleSym>Maybe we have to embrace that approach and reduce Guix to a minimal set of packages needed to build Guix itself and then build (possibly incompatible) channels on top of that.

<civodul>with all the dependency metadata now available out there (wheel, requirements.txt, poetry whatever), why aren’t we able to get a consistent set of packages?

<PurpleSym>It would lead to alot of stupid and unnecessary duplication, but throwing everything away and running `guix import` from scratch (“the Docker approach”) seems easier than carefully breaking and unbreaking dependencies 10 levels down the stack.

<civodul>it works for crates and for CRAN

<PurpleSym>civodul: Because that metadata is as bad as the software.

<civodul>ah :-)

<civodul>but then Python is doomed?

<PurpleSym>Kindof.

<PurpleSym>Not Python itself, but the ecosystem.

<civodul>do people use pip exclusively with wheels, pre-compiled, and thus they don’t realize dependency info is all broken?

<PurpleSym>Yep. Even on commercial projects we just `pip install` the wheels into our Docker images (without checking the code, obviously).

<PurpleSym>I think Guix is one of the few distribution that even tries to run tests. We could save us alot of trouble if we did not.

<civodul>what a bleak situation

<PurpleSym>Not bleak, just a reality of finite resources that need to be prioritized (time, money, knowledge).

<PurpleSym>Just like I exhausted my Guix time for today :(

<PurpleSym>rekado: Can we drop the python-notebook updates from python-team and just merge the improvements to pyproject-build-system? I don’t have time to go down that rabbit hole and if no-one else does, the branch will just bit-rot even further.

<civodul>PurpleSym: oh sure; i was thinking about the situation for Python in general, it’s bad that with the profusion of packaging/environment tools they have the situation has not improved

<civodul>there’s no lack of resources in Python, as i see it

<civodul>i understand why you’re exhausted though!

<PurpleSym>civodul: With “profusion of packaging tools” you mean PEP 517, i.e. pyproject-build-system?

<PurpleSym>Not exhausted. A few hours a week are simply not enough to deal with this.

<PurpleSym>We need more full-time Guixers :)

<civodul>heh

<civodul>PurpleSym: i mean requirements.txt, wheels metadata, Poetry, etc.

<civodul>i don’t know the PEPs :-)

<civodul>seeing it as an outsider

<civodul>but yeah, this work certainly needs more people dedicated every day

IRC channel logs

2024-05-03.log