Today I had to downgrade fastapi from 0.114.0 to 0.112.4 to make a software work. And it just hit me - what if pip didn’t support 0.112.4 anymore? We would lose a good piece of software just because of that.
Of course, we can “freeze” the packages into an executable that will run for as long as the OS supports it. Which is a lot longer. But the executable is closed source. We can’t see the code that is run from an executable.
Therefore, there is a need for an alternative to which we still have access to the packages even after the program is built. That would make it safely unnecessary for pip to store all versions of all packages forever more.
Any ideas?
If its an open source project, the answer is to rebuild from the tagged source.
Eg: https://github.com/fastapi/fastapi/tree/0.112.4
With the right repo setup, you can
pip install git+https://github.com/fastapi/fastapi.git@0.112.4(example only, not sure it works), so pypi doesn’t need to keep all previous wheels, its just easier for it to do so.There’s plenty of open source projects that distribute executables (i.e. all that use compiled languages). The projects just provide checksums, ensure their builds are reproducible, or provide some other method to verify.
In practice, you’re going to wind up in dependency hell before pypi stops hosting the package. E.g. you need to use package A and package B, but package A depends on v1 of package C, and package B depends on v2 of package C.
And you don’t need to use pypi or pip at all. You could just download the code and directly from tbe repo, import it into your project (possibly needing to build if it has binary components). However, if it was on pypi before, then the source repo likely had all the code pip needs to install it (i.e. contains setup.py and any related files).