how to write a conf-* package where only pip installing some stuffs is required? [question]

[UnixJunkie]

Hello,

Concerning the conf-rdkit package; the new install instructions for the dependencies are just:

pip3 install rdkit

How do we tell this to opam?

For conf-rdkit, the presence of a pip package makes things way easier: we don't need anymore to know which package in which distro is required. It might also install on more distros nowadays.

Thanks a lot, F.

[mseri]

This we cannot really do at the moment. Also I'd rather not have packages polluting my global pip install, I'd rather deal with it myself using pipx or other sandboxes.

This raises an important point that we should brainstorm more though. We have many packages using R, python, javascript, ... It is getting more and more useful to try and think of ways we could leverage them with local "sandboxed" installations for the cases in which packages are not present in the system. I think this is what julia does with python's packages, so that they know where to find them (but maybe I am wrong).

I would not want to make opam having to learn those, there would be so many corner cases to deal with... but having a common scheme would surely be useful imo

[UnixJunkie]

Ok, I am glad I asked then. Maybe I'll just update the failure message of this package then.

[UnixJunkie]

maybe we should label this issue with something