On 14 September 2016 at 21:43, Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote: > >> On Sep 13, 2016, at 7:06 PM, Steve Dower <steve.do...@python.org> wrote: >> >> This is exactly the argument I was expecting when I said "those who want it >> to be perfect in every scenario" > > FWIW I don’t have a strong feeling on whether we should add it or not. I > haven’t been a beginner in a long time and I am not very good at putting > myself in their shoes. I legitimately don’t know what would be more or less > confusing here, possible weird state (with or without a warning that they > might be getting into weird state territory) or an error message telling them > to use a real shell and not the Python REPL.
I think they're both confusing, but one of them we can be more certain the user will have the ability to resolve, regardless of their computing background. Specifically, someone already familiar with the difference between a system shell and the Python REPL isn't likely to make the mistake in question in the first place - "$ pip install name" is clearly a shell command *if* you know what the "$" indicates, while the unqualified "pip install name" used in Warehouse for cross-platform consistency still looks more like a system command than it does a Python expression (it would be a potentially valid function call in some other languages though, most notably MATLAB in the context of this discussion). For someone that *doesn't* know the difference though, the only thing we can be sure of is that they know how to run a Python REPL, and hence presumably how to stop and restart that REPL. It's also the case that for through-the-browser development, the user may not have system shell access at all, even if they do already know the difference between the two environments. So if we're able to emit a warning that says "NOTE: Updated package installed for already loaded module '<name>'. Restart Python to load the new version.", then novice users are likely to take us at our word and restart Python. Intermediate users may say "Hah, I know imp.reload(), so I can ignore that warning!" and try to selective reload things. Experienced users more familiar with what a debugging nightmare selective reloading can be with a deep module dependency tree and usage of the "from X import Y" early binding syntax may then end up going back to just restarting their REPL session after installing new things :) Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
