"Give me a single command I can run. Always. For any project. And that always works."

    pipx install X

Right so; I'll try that next time. Thanks. I just go by the very prominent "pip install X" on every pypi page (as well as "pip install .." in many READMEs).

Yeah, totally understand that - pipx is still pretty poorly known by people who are active in Python development!

A few of my READMEs start like this: https://github.com/simonw/paginate-json?tab=readme-ov-file#i...

    ## Installation

    pip install paginate-json

    Or use pipx (link to pipx site)

    pipx install paginate-json

But I checked and actually most them still don't even mention it. I'll be fixing that in the future.

Out of the 3 things I want to install 2 don't work. Both of these seem bugs in pipx so I reported one, but the feedback was borderline hostile and it ended up being closed with "unclear what you want". I'm not even going to bother reporting the other bug.

So whatever the goals are, it doesn't really work. And in general pipx does not strike me as a serious project.

Pipx is great! Although, I always seem to have to set up PATH, at least on windows?

That single command is pipx.

I could say the exact same stuff about NodeJs, c++, go, rust, php, etc. All of these are easy to use and debug and "install easily" when you know them and use them regularly, and the opposite if you're new. Doubly-so if you personally don't like that language or have some personal pet peeve about it's choices.

Guys let's not pretend like this is somehow unique to python. It's only until about a few years ago that it was incredibly difficult to install and use npm on windows. Arguably the language ecosystem with the most cumulative hipster-dev hours thrown at it, and it still was a horrible "dev experience".

That does not match my experience. I've been working with Python for a year or so and the packaging problems come up every now and then still.

I've installed/built a few packages written in Go and Rust specifically and had no problems.