front matter
Everyone starts their Python journey in a different place. Regardless of how you start, you’ll eventually start working your way upstream to experience new sights and sounds. As the river narrows and the trees thicken, you may even start to think about how to deliver a Python application to others. There you find hulls of shattered projects around the entrance to a hidden cavern at the river's headwaters. Suddenly you hear a hollow voice ask, “What’s your favorite packaging tool?” right before you’re flung into a chasm.
Python has something for everyone—and you’ll usually find it on the Python Package Index (https://pypi.org). PyPI brings about new challenges as you start to worry about installation, dependencies, environments, and other important matters related to using your software in the real world. This is where new open source packages are created and maintained. This is the starting point for this much-needed book.
A quiet secret of most Python books is that nobody really wants to talk much about packaging (and I speak from experience). Oh, books are more than happy to talk about modules and packages in terms of software organization. A book might even provide a simple skeleton of a basic package that you can give away. However, the actual process of making a production-grade downloadable package is often “left as an exercise.” As such, this book occupies a unique niche as it directly tackles this specific problem.