On 17 November 2016 at 21:35, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 17 November 2016 at 10:58, Cory Benfield <c...@lukasa.co.uk> wrote: >> Instead, I think we need a way to be able to ask the question: “what does >> the wider Python development community consider to be the gold standard for >> solving problem X?”. > > Agreed, that's the key unsolved question for Python packaging.
Not just Python packaging - open source publishing in general, and one of the big metrics we have providing evidence of this is hosted package growth rates. Some registries try to present exponential growth in the number of hosted packages as a good thing, but they're often wrong to do so: in most cases, that kind of exponential growth is more likely to represent a failure of software discovery mechanisms (so folks are publishing their own custom solutions to previously solved problems rather than adopting existing tools as "good enough") than it is actual growth in the number of different problem domains with readily available published toolkits for tackling them. That's fine in a software-as-creativity-and-play context, but it's a problem in the software-as-a-means-to-an-end mindset that is applicable to most professional development activities. The one upside I see to the current state of affairs is that this problem isn't *new* - it's existed for as long as we've had software, it was just hidden away behind the walls of the institutions writing custom in-house software. Now that more software publication and consumption activities are instead starting to happen in the open, the problem can be quantified, and various automated techniques brought to bear on tackling it. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
