[upstream] Install trial utilities from PyPI in isolated virtualenvs
User story: I am a Liberty developer. I want to use a Python-based command line utility that is not yet packaged in Debian/PureOS, so that I can work more efficiently now rather than wait for if/when the utility is packaged. Also, I can test utilities to see if they are worth recommending for packaging.
Suggested solution: pipx is a utility similar to pipsi
and npx
. It allows the user to install and run a Python executable. So you can pipx install youtube-dl
and then call youtube-dl
from the command line. You could achieve the same result with pip install --local youtube-dl
but all executables installed that way share dependencies, and may have conflicting dependencies. By contrast, pipx creates isolated virtualenvs for each utility. You can achieve the same result with pipsi install youtube-dl
but pipsi appears to be unmaintained and lacks useful features compared to pipx (and is unlikely to get them). See https://github.com/cs01/pipx#how-does-this-compare-to-pipsi for details. This utility would additionally benefit from native packaging to leapfrog the installation conundrum, "what tool do I use to install pipx itself?" See https://github.com/cs01/pipx/issues/44 for details.
Notes: It would be ideal to have the solution packaged in Debian/PureOS.
This is being implemented in https://bugs.debian.org/916261
Success:
In PureOS green, I can:
sudo apt install python-pipx
pipx install black
black --version