This page, or series of pages—The State of Python Packaging in $YEAR—should have no reason to exist in the first place. But things being as they are, https://xkcd.com/1987/ is as relevant as ever. Compare what's going in the Python ecosystem with how e.g. `npm` works in NodeJS. You can hate NodeJS and npm all day long and point out a not-so-small number of problems and gotchas in the details, it's still lightyears ahead of anything Python has to offer in terms of reliability and simplicity. And it's not only Python's packaging system, it's the entire module import system that is a boat load of overcomplicated c**p. In NodeJS, when you want the contents of a module that lives at `/path/to/module.js`, you say `const x = require( '/path/to/module.js' )`. There's some amount of additional computation going on there in order to resolve relative and underspecified paths and to keep a cache of loaded modules, but other than that, the module contents are basically loaded, then `eval()`ed, that's it.

In Python, when you want to import a module from a path, you have to:

    def module_from_path( name, path ):
      import importlib
      import importlib.util
      spec                      = importlib.util.spec_from_file_location( name, path )
      module                    = importlib.util.module_from_spec( spec )
      sys.modules[ spec.name ]  = module
      spec.loader.exec_module( module )
      return importlib.import_module( name )

wat?