Instead you get to pip install. But pip isn't installed. easy-install pip? What's easy-install - it's not there? (brew|yum|apt-get) disttools. Forget this... download get_pip.py, run python get_pip.py... Some error about libsodium now? Where do I get gcc for Windows 10 again?
Python's greatest weakness is its packaging and distribution, and this project makes no effort to make it simple.
And that covers 90% of the people that care. Granted I think you're right that software packaging and distribution is still generally broken in 2017, but that's a problem across the board. It's a problem with java, node.js, python, etc.
Disagree. I don't know a single non-programmer with brew installed on their Mac, and non-programmers make up 90% of the people who have the most trouble copying files between two computers.
sysadmin here in MAD world using homebrew since Lion. First thing I did when I got in this morning was to pull out my personal MBP and install magic-wormhole.
So... 'brew install rssh' is bad and kludgy, but 'brew install magic-wormhole' is easy and light? And hey, if you're not on a mac, you have to also install a bunch of other deps too.
You probably shouldn't have tried to pad out your steps by taking a detour into package management.
Honestly, even if I have both rssh and magic-wormhole installed already, just creating a new user that can read (some of) the filesystem is already orders of magnitudes more hassle.
I'm not gonna argue against that. Using pip-install certainly limits our current audience to people who are comfortable with python packaging tools, which basically means python developers.
I'm hoping to get beyond that, once I get the protocol and feature set stabilized. Using something like PyInstaller or py2app to get a single-file executable will be the first step. Porting it to other languages (I've started on SPAKE2 in Rust) might help too.
FWIW, "apt install magic-wormhole" now works on Debian (stretch) and Ubuntu (zesty). Also homebrew, as mentioned before.
Quick survey: what packaged form would be most useful to you (for desktop usage.. having some kind of iOS/Android app is a whole other beast). PPA? .dmg? .exe? .msi?
A stand alone static binary that does not depend on system libraries.
Specifically, one that 'just works' on windows, and doesn't require that you open powershell and need to change into an obscure directory to use it, or have the binary sit in a folder full of DLLs to run.
In fact, ideally one you don't have to even type anything in; for example, if you can just say; grab this one file from some safe known url (eg. github), and rename it from 'magic.exe' to 'zesty-fruit-324234.exe' and run it.
This is true but not completely. You will only get pip when you install the binary downloaded from python.org. On osx, people use brew, on Debian, they use apt. It is most likely only Windows people will download those binaries but actually they use Anaconda, WinPython instead
I'm actually getting tired of package managers reinventing the wheel (literally) every time they want to install something.
In production when I deploy a django app, now I might have two libraries in different places in my system. One from the OS, and one from the pip dependency.
if only to address the dependency issue, one can rewrite the magic wormhole in go, then do cross-platform compilation and distribute the standalone binaries
Python's greatest weakness is its packaging and distribution, and this project makes no effort to make it simple.