[Python-Dev] OneGet provider for Python (original) (raw)

Vincent Povirk madewokherd at gmail.com
Sat Nov 15 02:44:55 CET 2014

Someone pointed out off-list that I didn't provide any explanation of what OneGet is. I saw it had been brought up on this list earlier, and incorrectly assumed that meant everyone would know what I was talking about.

OneGet is a new unified interface for using tools that work with software, which is being built and will ship with future versions of Windows (Linux support is planned but seems to be a long way off currently). It's intended to help solve the problems that a package manager would solve on Linux, without enforcing any particular ideas about how software should be packaged, obtained, or installed. It relies on external components (called "providers") to talk to existing packaging systems and do any real work.

Currently, the only UI for OneGet is a set of PowerShell commands, like Install-Package (which can take a filename, url, or name of a package as long as some provider can make sense of it), but there is an API available for use by installers, packaging tools that want to define external dependencies in some generic way, or other UI's.

So, having a Python provider would make it easier for Windows users to install Python software, and cut down on the work required to package software written in Python for Windows. (Ideally, in this case developers would just have to package it in PyPI, or provide a source archive or .whl, and OneGet should be able to automate installation of that and everything it needs, in this case probably by installing Python and pip, and asking pip to do the real work. I am planning to write the component that figures out all the Python-specific parts of this.)

Or, more succinctly, the plan is to do everything pip already does (on Windows only for now), but in a way that also supports all kinds of other packagers and doesn't require the user to manually install Python and pip.

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