> On 20 Nov 2020, at 16:42, Ricky Teachey <[email protected]> wrote: > > I was reading the pyinstaller thread and had this idea but didn't want to > hijack. > > Maybe a wild idea, and very possible totally impractical or hopelessly > complex, but: could the existing pypi infrastructure be leveraged into a set > of platform-specific app stores? Maybe maybe we could make it as simple as a > single line in a pyproject.toml file. > > Imagine if all the end user does is install the store, and clicks the link to > the project app. The store takes care of the rest. The developer marks their > package as an installable program to be published to the store, optionally > specifying things like specific platforms if needed. All the project website > does for users to install is provide a url to their app in the store. > > Very very rough idea of how it might work: a store app API would provide an > installation GUI if desired, and the store would build the environment needed > for installing the package and dependencies. Once the specified environment > is built, pip would take care of installing the package as usual. > > If this is an awful idea feel free to just say so. I have given it no deep > thought and do not have the expertise to even think through what would be > needed to create such a thing.
In some sense PyPI already is such a store, if you don’t mind launching applications from the command line. That said, using PyPI in this way is not necessarily useful even ignoring platforms where side-loading is frowned upon or even impossible. As a user of applications I don’t really care in what language an application is written in, I don’t wan to look in the Python App Store, or the C# App Store, I just wan to use application A. Russel Keith-MacKee has a PyCon talk about Black Swans that talks (amongst others) about the problem of app distribution in particular on systems that aren’t desktop systems. Ronald — Twitter / micro.blog: @ronaldoussoren Blog: https://blog.ronaldoussoren.net/ _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/KGCUDPRZUFEZ3FEESY7U44QVVMD7WAGX/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
