I've Walked 500 Miles…

… and I would walk 500 more
Just to be the man who walks a thousand miles
To fall down at your door

The Main Road

Hi, have you met fast-deps? It's (going to be) the name of pip's experimental feature that may improve the speed of dependency resolution of the new resolver. By avoid downloading whole wheels to just obtain metadata, it is especially helpful when pip has to do heavy backtracking to resolve conflicts.

Thanks to Chris Hunt's review on GH-8537, my mentor Pradyun Gedam and I worked out a less hacky approach to inteject the call to lazy wheel during the resolution process. A new PR GH-8588 was filed to implement it—I could have just worked on top of the old PR and rebased, but my git skill is far from gud enough to confidently do it.

Testing this one has been a lot of fun though. At first, integration tests were added as a rerun of the tests for the new resolver, with an additional flag to use feature fast-deps. It indeed made me feel guilty towards Travis, who has to work around 30 minutes more every run. Per Chris Hunt's suggestion, in the new PR, I instead write a few functional tests for the area relating the most to the feature, namely pip's subcommands wheel, download and install.

It was also suggested that a mock server with HTTP range requests support might be better (in term of performance and reliablilty) than for testing. However, I have yet to be able to make Werkzeug do it.

Why did I say I'm half way there? With the parallel utilities merged and a way to quickly get the list of distribution to be downloaded being really close, what left is only to figure out a way to properly download them in parallel. With no distribution to be added during the download progress, the model of this will fit very well with the architecture in my original proposal. A batch downloader can be implemented to track the progress of each download and thus report them cleanly as e.g. progress bar or percentage. This is the part I am second-most excited about of my GSoC project this summer (after the synchronization of downloads written in my proposal, which was then superseded by fast-deps) and I can't wait to do it!

The Side Quests

As usual, I make sure that I complete every side quest I see during the journey:

• GH-8568: Declare constants in configuration.py as such
• GH-8571: Clean up Configuration.unset_value and nit the class' __init__
• GH-8578: Allow verbose/quite level to be specified via config file and env var
• GH-8599: Replace tabs by spaces for consistency

Snap Back to Reality

A bit about me, I actually walked 500 meters earlier today to a bank and walked 500 more to another to prepare my Visa card for purchasing the upcoming Pinephone prototype. It's one of the first smartphones to fully support a GNU/Linux distribution, where one can run desktop apps (including proper terminals) as well as traditional services like SSH, HTTP server and IPFS node because why not? Just a few hours ago, I pre-ordered the postmarketOS community edition with additional hardware for convergence.

If you did not come here for a Pinephone ad, please take my apologies though d-; and to ones reading this, I hope you all can become the person who walks a thousand miles to fall down at the door opening to all what you ever wished for!