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[Python-ideas] Make it optional

anatoly techtonik techtonik at gmail.com
Tue Feb 11 15:33:33 CET 2014 
On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 February 2014 07:20, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:
>>> "Make it optional" is a very good principle for those cases
>>> when you can not predict how users are going to use your
>>> feature and if they need it at all.
>>
>> I have no idea what you are talking about.  Care to give some context?
>
> Anatoly has just raised a series of issues against pip, all
> essentially reiterating the same point that he doesn't like pip's new
> handling of prerelease vs release versions (which was thrashed out and
> agreed in a PEP)  I assume he's trying to get support for some vague
> meta-point here in the hope that by doing so he'll feel justified in
> arguing further on the pip issues :-(

Right. Smart people invented prerelease feature for PyPI, which works
the following way:

 - if pip thinks that your version is not PEP compliant, it won't install it,
   because it thinks that everything what is not PEP aware is prerelease

I think that final decision whatever package version is prerelease or not
should be made by package maintainer, and (s)he should have a final
judgement over this fact. But inventors of prerelease feature didn't even
think that people may not want and still don't want this features.

That's why I proposed "Make it optional" principle as an engineering
practice for solutions that affect the whole net.
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