[Slackbuilds-users] switching a SlackBuild to pip? (Python) Giving up interruptingcow, mpmath SlackBuilds

[David Spencer]

> I maintain Mathics SlackBuild, which had update problems with
> libraries, and the Mathics maintainers aren't always that informative,
> so I just found a last October update works. However, it uses pip,
> which downloads source code I already downloaded. If I update my
> SlackBuild, how should I use pip?

*Don't* use pip.  The upstream instructions say "The easiest way to
install Mathics is with pip", but the existing setup.py recipe still
works with mathics-1.0.

We don't like downloads inside SlackBuilds, for multiple reasons, the
only exception being node if it's unavoidable.  Also, see below.

> I'm not sure Mathics SlackBuild is even needed anymore, as anyone can
> download, read source code documentation for installation that says do
> 'pip install mathics'... but I'll maintain this for convenience, if
> you think some wouldn't go to that extent or know that's possible or
> how.

The whole point of distro packages instead of pip is that you get
packages that can be handled the same as everything else on your
system, or indeed scalably and repeatably on a whole cluster of
systems, configuration managed, regularly upgraded etc.

pip, npm, cpan, gem, cabal, etc, all have their place (single user box
where the user is both competent and lazy), but they are not capable
of substituting for proper distro packages. Hence SlackBuilds for
everything, and also npm2tgz, cpan2tgz and gem2tgz.  (There isn't a
pip2tgz -- well, there is, but it does something else -- but even if
there was, it would be a dead end, because the future is probably
wheels instead of pip.)

afaict your existing SlackBuild is easy to upgrade for mathics-1.0:
just change the tar xvf (the download tarball is now named .tgz), and
the patch isn't needed.

> I give up interruptingcow, mpmath SlackBuilds (Mathics dependencies)
> since pip installs those for Mathics.

You might want to reconsider that?

Thanks
-D.