In late March, version 78.0.1 of Setuptools — an important Python packaging tool — was released [...]

Discussing a breaking change in Python’s setuptools.

The really interesting part is in the discussion section… and it shows once more how incredibly well-designed the GNU Guix package manager is – which solves these problems very very well, for arbitrary languages and with a fast growing distribution of, by now, about 50,000 packages.

    • Solumbran@lemmy.world
      1·
      7 days ago

      I don’t remember exactly, they were trying to package some dependencies they needed with guix and it was just a big headache.

      • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgOP
        1·
        7 days ago

        So, how many users of Debian would even think about creating own packages?

        I already have a hunch what went wrong: they were probably trying to package software that has no standard build system. This is painful because the standard tools, like GNU autotools for C programs, or cmake, or setuptools or its newer siblings for python, make sure that the right commands are used to build a package on whatever platform, and that, importantly, its components are installed into the right places. If they don’t use these, they will have a problem to build packages for any standard distribution.

        Guix has support for all the mayor build systems (otherwise, it could not support building of 50000 packages).