Pipfile for Python
As someone who has been dealing with managing Python requirements a lot lately, I was excited to see what Pipfile is all about. After reading the post and all the comments here, it's still not really clear to me what the value add is over existing solutions.<p>There are a lot of mentions of deterministic builds, but that is already very achievable with pip-compile (part of pip-tools) or just pip freeze.<p>The grouping functionality allows you to have just one requirements file instead of one per environment (i.e. production, test, development, etc) which is mostly just a personal preference IMO. This isn't particularly compelling to me, but that could be because I'm already used to the traditional "pythonic" way of having one file per environment. Using the -r command within a requirement file allows one to recursively include other requirements files to avoid duplication of common dependencies across environments.<p>The difference in syntax between traditional requirements files and Pipfiles is indeed pretty large. The Pipfile syntax is quite a bit more verbose which I'm personally not a fan of, but this will come down to personal preference and what one is familiar with.<p>It's unclear if Pipfiles as proposed here is meant to include the dependency resolution functionality of the pip-compile command provided by pip-tools. That is a very critical step as vanilla pip makes no guarantees about respecting version pins of nested dependencies; only that <i>some</i> version of a nested dependency will be present but not necessarily the one intended.<p>Another big unknown that others have asked about as well is how Pipfiles can be used to manage requirements for a library in a way that allows other libraries/apps that do not use Pipfiles themselves to still list said library in their requirements.txt.<p>Apologies if my comments comes across as overly negative or dismissive; I applaud any effort to improve the tooling around Python dependencies. But as someone already familiar with the Python/pip ecosystem, it's not clear how this would improve or simplify the solutions that are already out there.