Tuesday 9 February 2010 — This is nearly 15 years old. Be careful.
Python packaging is a common theme on which to complain, and rightly so. It’s no one’s first love, so it tends not to get the devoted attention of say, Numpy. And it’s a hard problem to solve well. So we have a mish-mash of tools that each do about 75% of the job.
But there’s one small aspect of Python packaging that could easily be solved well if people just attended to it: Not enough Python projects clearly state what versions of Python they run on.
For example, suppose you are in the market for a mock object library for your tests. There’s no shortage. Less than a minute at PyPI produces mock, MiniMock, mocktest, Mocky, pmock, mocker, mockito, and ludibrio. Some of those PyPI pages have extensive documentation. Not a single one explicitly mentions the versions of Python supported. And I don’t mean 2.x vs. 3.x. I want to know if it will run on 2.4 or not. Ludibrio and Mocky offer a slight clue in that they are available for download as an egg, for 2.5 and 2.4 respectively. pMock mentions >= 2.3 support on the home page linked from the PyPI page.
On top of all the other well-known difficulties people have with Python packaging, at the very least, we should be able to manage this: clearly state what versions of Python you support. This is a simple three-step process:
- Decide what versions you want to support.
- Test your code on those versions.
- Add a sentence like this to your PyPI documentation: “SpockMocker runs on Python 2.5 and 2.6”.
The Python community will thank you.
Comments
It would be helpful to indicate what platforms are tested, or intended to run. In a lot of cases there's really not much intention though. The author can say what they use and test, but that's the sum of it. (Of course, some libraries explicitly don't support some versions of Python, usually 2.3 or 2.4, and that could actually be put into dependency information and made quite explicit).
* Replace .pypirc password field with something more secure (ssh?). Storing my PyPI in plain ASCII just doesn't feel right.
* Add long_description checker to PyPI side. Currently it's possible to handle this manually by using http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.checkdocs/0.1.1 but I would not mind if PyPI would reject my package if it's long_description was not valid reST syntax.
* Add "documentation" field. It might be nice if it pointed directly to http://packages.python.org/ if the packager has uploaded some documentation there though I would be more than happy with a field that's just set explicitly.
Just a comment about the version issue... Is there some simple way to set up a testing environment so that the package may be run against given range of versions (ie. 2.2-2.6, 3.0-3.1)? This also brings forth the interesting question how to handle any version specific hacks. I rather would not pollute single codebase with the hacks. Perhaps there should be a branch for each or something similar.
setup( name='mypackage', packages=['mypackage'], version='1.0', description='Does something usefull', long_description=open('README.rst', 'r').read(), classifiers = [ # Get more strings from http://www.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=list_classifiers "Development Status :: 5 - Production/Stable", "Programming Language :: Python :: 2.6", "Programming Language :: Python :: 2.7", ] )e.g. for Pinax, on Pypi, look under category:http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pinax/
@Juho: you can omit the password now, distutils will ask it for you at the prompt. I am also working on integrating Keyring.
2.7 contains now a "check" command you can use to check for reSt compliancy.
@Tarek, these all look like great improvements, but I'd be happy if people just put words on the page too...
I've raised an issue on the mock issue tracker to add the version classifications to PyPI next time I do a release. I'd better check my other packages as well. :-(
I also realised that Bicking's excellent virtualenv should provide a nice basis for testing against different versions of Python. Pretty much all you need to do is to set up a script to generate virtualenvs against wanted versions of Python and have it run the tests against each version at each env. I don't know it has direct API for something like this but it should be doable anyhow. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an existing solution for this.
Considering the codebase issue I mentioned about earlier it might be most straightforward to have one branch for 2.x and 3.x each. I suppose that's how most of people handle it. Optimally you should be able to focus on maintaining on 2.x version while porting the changes using the 2to3 utility (no idea how well it works in practice) though I guess it might take some manual work as well.
I'll need to update it for Python 3.x+ sometime soon.
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