Question: Support for PyPi Packages planned?

[arnoan]

I just discovered pixi-pack and love the idea of being able to create a fully self-contained reproducible environment.

When using a pixi.lock file that also references PyPi dependencies (not all packages we use are available on conda-forge unfortunately), I receive an error: "Error: PyPI packages are not supported in pixi-pack".

Question:
Is it within the scope/vision of pixi-pack to eventually also support PyPI packages or that is deliberately out-of-scope for the time being as I can imagine it would add a lot of additional complexity.

Either way: Big kudos for the great project! 👏

[pavelzw]

unfortunately this would break the micromamba/conda compatibility mode that we have built into pixi-pack.

especially sdists are inherently non-reproducible. but i think adding support for wheels could be nice, PRs are welcome

[fecet]

prefix-dev/pixi#2049 could be useful

[mjkanji]

@pavelzw Since we can now create self-extracting binaries, is there a particular benefit to keeping conda compatibility? If someone wants to extract an env without pixi-pack installed, wouldn't that be the better option?

[pavelzw]

I still find it nice to be able to be able to use this tool when you only have conda/micromamba availablle; especially in corporate environments where you are not able to execute arbitrary binaries (pixi-pack pack --create-executable is an arbitrary binary).
That being said, I still think that wheels-only should be fine, the conda/micromamba compatibility just won't work in these cases which is okay.

As already mentioned, I'm open to PRs adding pypi wheels support.