Python Packaging: Why we can't have nice things, Part 2

Pip has a lot of problems (that I'll be discussing in future posts in this series), but the good news is that you don't have to resort to heavyweight third-party tools to improve your experience with Python packaging. Pipx (now under the Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) umbrella) is a focused wrapper around Pip that handles the major pain points without trying to take over your entire workflow.

In this post I'll talk about Pipx's major use cases, its limitations, and how to get more mileage out of it with a few simple tweaks.

When I originally conceived of this series, I figured I'd have a post far down the road about good practices to avoid problems with existing tools and ways to make the experience suck less. Unfortunately, while third-party tools work well for a lot of other people, I can't find a lot to recommend them based on my personal needs and preferences. Outside of "wait until my own projects, Paper and bbbb, are in good working order", I realized that most of the productive suggestions I can offer revolve around a) Pipx and b) some helper scripts I use with Pip. But now that I have Pipx, my workflow around Pip generally involves the copy of Pip that Pipx installs for itself and wraps.

Meanwhile, as I was working on other things and discovering that I really can't post with the frequency I'd like, I got private feedback that giving useful, actionable advice really should be a higher priority than pointing out all the technical issues. So, here we go.

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