The PSF and PyPA are more than welcome to get their act together and tell a good packaging story for Python. Unfortunately all they’ve had to offer is a billion contributor blog posts essentially saying “the system we set up for ourselves limits our ability to be helpful, and that’s not our fault, somehow.”
They’re all so caught up in their internal systems and politics[1] that they don’t seem to know why they’re actually there anymore.
So if someone’s gonna go do an actually-good job and capture the market in the way that Astral is, then that’s exactly what we as a community deserve.
[1]: I mean internal politics. This is a weird alt right “DEI HIRE!” rant.
Maybe a good example here is how the mamba team (quantstack) got frustrated with conda speed, splintered off to massively speed up things, and afaict it's now the new default solver. Even better, they seem to have a healthy consultancy doing projects like this, which solves the sustainability problem better than VC funding, which is a non-answer.
I'm for small teams doing big pushes, and the example shows such efforts can coexist with healthier long-term governance strategies. It's sad that the effort was needed, but nonetheless, a clear demonstration of separation of concerns working for small engineering team => bigger governance org.
It's also a bad look for the engineering priorities of anaconda inc on their flagship product. I wonder 'how we got there': Anaconda devs help build GPU python stacks, numba, etc, so they are quite good on what they do work on. Is every for-profit packaging-oriented company ultimately not paid enough to keep the packaging core fast? So VC $ just speeds up the schedule to mediocrity?
VC funding redirects the company’s focus on whatever is going to drive profits in the short or medium term. This does not necessarily align with great engineering :/ It’s often a poisoned chalice.
They’re all so caught up in their internal systems and politics[1] that they don’t seem to know why they’re actually there anymore.
So if someone’s gonna go do an actually-good job and capture the market in the way that Astral is, then that’s exactly what we as a community deserve.
[1]: I mean internal politics. This is a weird alt right “DEI HIRE!” rant.