Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

This is very exciting! Congratulations to the Astral team on their work here.

I have historically expressed trepidation towards external attempts to "fix" Python packaging, largely because each attempt has historically accreted another layer of incompatibilities and hacks onto the giant pile of hacks that are already needed to keep the ecosystem running. As such, it makes me happy to see that compatibility is a priority here: the Astral team has gone out of their way to emphasize both formal (PEP) and informal (pip CLI) compatibility with existing tooling and standards.

(Separately, I share concerns about VC funding and sustainability. But everything I've seen so far indicates that Charlie and the other folks at Astral are not in it to screw or otherwise leverage the Python community. So I choose to be optimistic here.)

Prioritizing compatibility with a giant incompatible pile of historical hacks is how you grow the pile

I don't think that's true, at least in the case of Python packaging. The pile has historically grown because of informal or non-existent standards, along with multiple independent implementations attempting to align their observed (but not specified) behaviors.

Well, they do explicitly list certain historical features that they don't intend to support, like installation from eggs or editable installs. So they're doing some work to trim the pile while they're there.

They do support editable installs, but only from local directories. So you have to perform git clone yourself and then install.

We do actually support direct installation of Git and direct URL dependencies. Like, you can do run `uv pip install` with:

``` black @ git+https://github.com/psf/black ```

We also support editable installs for local directories, like you mentioned:

``` black @ ../black ```

The thing we don't support is using _editable_ installs for Git and direct URL dependencies, like:

``` -e git+https://github.com/psf/black ```

In my experience, these are really rare, and we didn't see a reason to support them.

Thanks for the correction, both of you. :)

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