I've encountered frustration with Python packaging in two main areas:
1) Installing applications within Docker containers. While wheels have improved this situation, I was surprised that building a package for easy copying into a container and running without the need for installing build tools and extensions in the final container image was not straightforward, especially coming from other languages.
2) Distributing Python utilities to end users across various platforms in an easily installable manner without requiring them to follow lengthy instructions to set up all the dependencies has been another challenge.
We use Poetry and have largely "solved" #1 with a somewhat complicated Docker build. It works well now, so no one has to think about it much. That made deploying Python server-side fairly easy. However, #2 has been much more of a challenge, and I wonder if that is where other folks in this thread are feeling the most pain.
- they require different instructions for each platform: one for each distribution: it's not possible to give a one liner that will work for all supported OS/architecture combinations,
- distributions are not all updated at the speed of upstream. Sometimes users do not want to wait several years to use a recently released feature.
1) Installing applications within Docker containers. While wheels have improved this situation, I was surprised that building a package for easy copying into a container and running without the need for installing build tools and extensions in the final container image was not straightforward, especially coming from other languages.
2) Distributing Python utilities to end users across various platforms in an easily installable manner without requiring them to follow lengthy instructions to set up all the dependencies has been another challenge.
We use Poetry and have largely "solved" #1 with a somewhat complicated Docker build. It works well now, so no one has to think about it much. That made deploying Python server-side fairly easy. However, #2 has been much more of a challenge, and I wonder if that is where other folks in this thread are feeling the most pain.