Textual 0.29.0 refactors dev tools¶
It's been a slow week or two at Textualize, with Textual devs taking well-earned annual leave, but we still managed to get a new version out.
Version 0.29.0 has shipped with a number of fixes (see the release notes for details), but I'd like to use this post to explain a change we made to how Textual developer tools are distributed.
Previously if you installed textual[dev] you would get the Textual dev tools plus the library itself. If you were distributing Textual apps and didn't need the developer tools you could drop the [dev].
We did this because the less dependencies a package has, the fewer installation issues you can expect to get in the future. And Textual is surprisingly lean if you only need to run apps, and not build them.
Alas, this wasn't quite as elegant solution as we hoped. The dependencies defined in extras wouldn't install commands, so textual was bundled with the core library. This meant that if you installed the Textual package without the [dev] you would still get the textual command on your path but it wouldn't run.
We solved this by creating two packages: textual contains the core library (with minimal dependencies) and textual-dev contains the developer tools. If you are building Textual apps, you should install both as follows:
That's the only difference. If you run in to any issues feel free to ask on the Discord server!