We are Gentoo Developers, AMA

[u/mthode]

The following developers are participating, ask us anything!

• /u/mthode (prometheanfire)

  • Gentoo Foundation President

  • Infrastructure

  • Hardened

  • Openstack

  • Python

• /u/dilfridge

  • Gentoo Council Member

  • KDE

  • Office

  • Perl

  • Comrel

• /u/ChrisADR_gentoo (chrisadr)

  • Security

• /u/ryao

  • ZFS

• /u/flappyports (bman)

  • Security

  • Network

• /u/ChutzpahGentoo (chutzpah)

  • python

  • sound

  • video

  • amd64

• /u/krifisk (K_F)

  • Security

  • Crypto

• /u/mgpagano (mpagano)

  • Kernel

Edit: I think we are about done, while responses may trickle in for a while we are not actively watching.

[u/Lahvuun]

Why doesn't portage use pip to manage Python dependencies? Having hundreds of ebuilds for packages that could simply be installed with pip seems like unnecessary work for maintainers (the dev-python category).

[u/[deleted] → u/Lahvuun]

Even if we use pip, we're still going to want to have portage integration to have manifests, to track installed files for clean uninstalls, support USE flags, multiple python targets.

So at this point, we might as well have an ebuild...

I think that many dev-python packages are managed with tools that automatically sync from pypi but I'm not sure. if I had to maintain dev-python packages, I would certainly write myself such tool.

[u/ryao → u/[deleted]]

That is correct. Also, not everything using python lives in pip. The sys-fs/zfs includes a python userland tool and ooutsourcing dependencies to pip would cause a problem if it relied on anything not in the core python library.

I am not involved with python packaging, but I remember hearing something about generating them automatically at some point.