Saturday October 30 7:30 AM – Saturday October 30 8:00 AM in Talks I

Towards Collaborative Reproducibility: Pinning Repository of Binary Distributions

Nguyễn Gia Phong, Huy Ngo

Prior knowledge:
No previous knowledge expected

Summary

Instead of pinning individual requirements or packaging up the entire environment in a container, how about archiving a repository snapshot of all dependencies? This talk will explore the characteristics of this approach, as well as what have been done with the InterPlanetary Wheels to realize them.

Description

IPWHL is a fresh take on Python dependency management. It aims to be a downstream wheel supplier (in a similar fashion to GNU/Linux distributions), whilst taking advantage of a content-addressing peer-to-peer network to provide a reproducible, easy-to-mirror source of packages.

While communicating the ideas around IPWHL, I will also discuss and compare it with common packaging and archival practices, highlighting the gap between upstream developers and the users of their libraries, in the following order:

  1. Upstream and downstream development: why do we need both?
  2. PyPI is a package index, not a user-facing repository!
  3. Containers are not as useful as you (might) think.
  4. Is IPWHL one-size-fits-all? No, but…
  5. How to use IPWHL and how can one help?

After the presentation, an attendee shall know the advantages (and shortcomings) of IPWHL and how to get started. Prior knowledge on Python packaging and IPFS can be helpful, but not required to understand the content of the talk.