Planning Huak's toolchain (feedback welcome)

[cnpryer]

I'm opening this discussion in case anyone passing by would like to provide feedback on what's planned for Huak's toolchain.

Right now I want to check this in using a planning.md file. See #796 for that work or the branch's file for the markdown. This branch will be deleted after the merge. When that occurs the following link should work: https://github.com/cnpryer/huak/blob/master/dev-resources/planning.md#huaks-toolchain.

[Yura52]

Hi! I check tools like Huak from time to time only from the user side of things, so I don't have strong opinions on how to build them :) For now, I can only say that the document seems to be oriented towards people closely familiar with the Rust tooling world ("channels", "toolchains", etc.). I don't know whether this is intentional, but sharing this impression just in case. To me, as for a user, it was not easy to understand how this document maps to my use cases.

[cnpryer]

Hi! Thanks for sharing :) yep! This is heavily inspired by Rust's toolchain.

To me, as for a user, it was not easy to understand how this document maps to my use cases

So some areas of interest for me personally would be:

• Managing Python installs - I like being able to swap between Python versions and install/uninstall Python without complications. Packaging Python as part of a managed toolchain makes that easy. That's generally the experience you get with rustup. It's kind of like a twist on pyenv.
• Managing global Python tools - Tools like ruff are useful to have available separate from individual projects. I like being able to separate the management of ruff on my system from managing environments for individual projects. Like the interpreter itself, I'd like to be able to package tools like ruff as part of a separately-managed environment. Installing ruff to a toolchain instead of a project's venv, to me, feels like a nice way to solve this. It's somewhat like pipx but organized as part of toolchains.

For myself at least, I'd love to have a system like this, so I'm curious if there are other things people would like included.