Allow packages that depend on other packages' executables to work

[rrthomas]

How would this feature be useful?

If I pipx install linton, then try to use the program, it gives an error that it can't find the nancy executable.

This is because linton depends on nancy, but uses it via its executable, which it runs with subprocess.check_call.

This is not a problem when installing via pip.

Describe the solution you'd like

I presume that script entry points for packages installed by pipx are installed somewhere; it would seem sufficient to add that place to the PATH of the scripts installed for the actual package being installed; so in this case, linton should have in its PATH the location of the nancy script.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• Special-casing support for pipx: somehow have linton work out it's been installed by pipx, and have it compute the path of nancy specially.
• Compute the exact path of the installed script. I have no idea how to do this.
• Rather than use subprocess.check_call, invoke Nancy as a Python module. This happens to be feasible in this case (because Nancy has a trivial main function that takes the same arguments as the command line).

Also, in this case I have other options open because I'm the maintainer of both packages, but none of the solutions I can think of work for 3rd-party dependencies.

Forgive me if I've overlooked something, as this seems a fairly obvious problem, but reading the docs and searching more widely has not yielded any insights.

[huxuan]

Maybe --include-deps of pipx install is what you need?

[rrthomas]

Thanks, that's an excellent workaround, which I will document for my package.

So, what I really need is a way for my package to specify that it requires --include-deps, as without that it won't work.

[huxuan]

Thanks, that's an excellent workaround, which I will document for my package.

I would say it is not a workaround but a feature pipx already support. :-)

Feel free to reopen this issue if you have any further problem.

[rrthomas]

[I am unable to reopen this issue, I do not have permission, apparently.]

Here's the problem:

pip install linton # the package is installed and works
pipx install linton # the package is installed, but does not work

I have now documented specially for my users that if they want to use pipx, they need to add the --include-deps command. Note that I was unable to find this option myself, so probably some users would also be unable to find it by themselves, or they would just assume that the package was broken.

I understand that linton is unusual in its use of a script from one of its dependencies, so I'd be content to provide special support for pipx to indicate that --include-deps should be activated automatically.