[Python-Dev] Re: Which thing is "Development Mode"

[Coyot Linden (Glenn Glazer)]

On 2/26/21 13:49, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

Hi Coyot, and welcome!

Can you explain the circumstances where a developer, or an end user,
might be confused as to which development mode is meant?

"Dev mode" is a very common term: Windows 10 has a development mode. So
does the X-Box and the Samsung Galaxy phone. Ruby on Rails also has a
development mode. So does the Opera web browser. I'm sure that with a
bit of googling, we could come up with a dozen more examples.

Normally, the context is all we need to disambiguate the different dev
modes, and if not, we can disambiguate the two by using fully qualified
names: "Galaxy dev mode" and "X-Box dev mode".

Under what circumstances is that not sufficient for Python dev mode and
setuptools dev mode?


Hi, Steven, and thanks for the kind welcome.

As a senior engineer, I occasionally mentor newer engineers and it 
frequently reminds me that what is obvious to me is not obvious to those 
starting out.


This is one of those cases, where those of us who have been around 
Python for awhile can perhaps infer from context which his meant, but 
the phrase "put your Python project into development mode" is ambiguous 
in a way that is different from your example. This is because both dev 
modes are a part of Python, unlike operating systems and platforms. That 
is, Samsung Galaxy and Windows 10 are very different ecosystems, but 
setuptools and Python features are part of the same ecosystem and often, 
the same context.


Best,

coyot
P.S. Got a giggle out of Victor's color suggestion, taking bikeshedding 
literally.

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[Python-Dev] Re: Which thing is "Development Mode"

[Paul Moore]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 at 16:25, Coyot Linden (Glenn Glazer)
 wrote:
> This is one of those cases, where those of us who have been around
> Python for awhile can perhaps infer from context which his meant, but
> the phrase "put your Python project into development mode" is ambiguous
> in a way that is different from your example.

The commonly used packaging terminology is actually "editable mode"
(at least in the sense that that's what most people seem to call it,
so knowing and using that term will get better results from Google
;-)). If you feel inclined to raise a PR against the pip documentation
to prefer that term, it can be discussed over there (but note that the
underlying setuptools command is `setup.py develop` and that's not
likely to change, as it's hard-coded in a number of applications,
including pip).

But ultimately, I think the reality is that there *are* terminology
confusions all over the place in computing, much like in any other
discipline (I'm currently teaching someone music, and the number of
terms that get re-used in different contexts there is even worse than
computing!) So I think that ultimately, beginners simply need to get
used to understanding that terms can be context-dependent. It's not
easy, and as teachers we can do what we can to make things clearer,
but we can't ever completely make such problems go away.

Paul
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