@glyph for Amaranth and Glasgow I've standardized on pipx and pdm. this seems to work ok; I never truly know who falls off if they don't tell me but if a ChemE with zero prior programming experience can do world-class work in six months I'm not at least failing hard
@glyph i actually place more focus on "how miserable is it past onboarding" than specifically "how miserable is onboarding". yes, the latter narrows down the first step of the funnel. but (and perhaps this is the domain talking) i think people are quick to discount mildly painful first experience if the rest of it is smooth, over the inverse
@glyph probably my proudest moment in this regard is hearing isabel (the ChemE i mentioned) say that "if you follow the glasgow installation instructions to the letter they never fail, regardless of the OS and environment". it took a lot of work to get there
@whitequark ❤️ some credit goes to the packaging ecosystem of course but even now that is a huge achievement, it's still very easy to forget that one command or configuration setting that you needed to apply early in the process that every python dev _already has_ but a new user won't
@whitequark shoot I should probably actually make a list of all of those that remain, I wonder if I could concretely list them out
@glyph specifically the thing that makes it possible is me working with the python-libusb1 maintanier to ship a DLL, the wasmtime-py maintainers to ship DLLs, and to myself tp ship YoWASP. it's not primarily a python packaging thing. PEP517 helps for sure but that's more of a developer angle not end user angle
@whitequark I think that the pyproject.toml revolution has made it so that many different choices are valid and work fine and it really is amazing that we've finally gotten to this point. pdm definitely works well, so does poetry, so does (sigh) uv, or hatchling. I use a bunch of different tools, sometimes _different_ tools than the project itself recommends, and rarely have problems
@glyph this is true but it's also more complicated than that. until recently (we've just started using that PDM feature) lockfiles weren't portable, for example
@whitequark yeah. I imagine Glasgow has a lot of very specialized needs that ram straight into the edges of what is currently made easy by the ecosystem
@glyph nope, it's one of the most boring python libraries around. you can check it out, all it has is a literal handful of dependencies and some entry points. it does rely on multiple native code dependencies but that's all handled by just normal pip mechancis
Nov 7, 2026, 8:22 PM@whitequark @glyph Maybe it's got better recently as I spent a lot of the last year in C# land, but I've never successfully built/run/deployed a Poetry project using PDM
Nov 7, 2026, 8:23 PM@whitequark @glyph Ugh, the lockfile situation is really unfortunate, yeah. I've got a whole section in the pyreading README about how screwed up the lockfile situation is.
Nov 7, 2026, 8:28 PM@whitequark @glyph Oh, `marker` finally landed in pylock, huh? That's really helpful! The main blocker for me was always having locks for optional dependency groups...
Nov 7, 2026, 8:21 PM@glyph @whitequark Even more that pyproject.toml itself, having PEP 517/8 define what cross-tooling builds should look like has been an absolute godsend. It's nothing short of miraculous to me that `pdm build` can build pure Python, Python+Rust, Python+C++, and Python+Zig/WASM packages using the exact same invocation.
@xgranade @whitequark yeah the number of times that a project with native dependencies worked so well on the first try that I didn't _notice_ it had native deps until months or even years later is truly staggering. if you had a native dep in 2011, it wasn't that I'd notice; my entire week was ruined
Nov 7, 2026, 8:25 PM@glyph @whitequark I'm working with enough obsolete packages that I still always notice native deps, and have developed a healthy fear of any packages that use dynamic linkage instead of static linkage, but that's absolutely my weird vantage point in trying to wrangle a cursed codebase that I didn't initially create.