Why pkglite for Python?

Differentiators

Building on our experience developing pkglite for R, we resolved several longstanding, unmet needs with pkglite for Python:

• Broader scope. Extend support for packing and unpacking packages across any programming language, without R-specific assumptions.
• Optimized tooling. Simplify packing logic by classifying files based on content rather than file extensions. UTF-8 in and UTF-8 out for all text files on all platforms.
• Engineering-friendly interface. Besides the language-specific API, provide a command-line interface (CLI) to better integrate with standard engineering workflows.

Design choices

We made a few key design changes from pkglite for R to implement the above goals:

• Introduced a .pkgliteignore configuration file to control packing scope, following the gitignore standard.
• Adopted content-based file type classification for unsupervised file discovery.
• Built with Python for better flexibility and accessibility.