Jeremy Stanley <fu...@yuggoth.org> writes: > For software development work, I compile my own Python interpreters > and libraries, because I need to develop against a variety of > different versions of these, sometimes in chroots, to be able to > target other distros and releases thereof. I keep all these in my > homedir or otherwise outside of normal system-wide installation > paths. Bear in mind that this isn't just a Debian problem, for > decades Red Hat has also advised programmers not to rely on their > /usr/bin/python for custom development because it is patched and > tuned specifically for running system applications packaged for > their distro and not intended as a general-purpose Python > distribution.
There are tools that will help you do this. e.g. pyenv, asdf, etc. But, yes, for my own software development, I gave up trying to use Debian python packages years ago, because I found I was spending way more time trying to package the required dependencies (and dependencies of dependencies of dependencies) then I spending developing my application. This gets even worse if you want to support rpm based distributions. Plus the fact that I was becoming increasingly concerned that if I upgraded library python3-L for application A, I might accidentally break applications B, C, and D also, and testing/fixing everything at the same time not really feasible. So now I use asdf + poetry/virtualenvs now, plus Docker for distribution. As a result, I can upgrade the dependencies in each application one application at a time. If an application breaks, I just need to fix that one application, without breaking everything else at the same time. I can upgrade the OS distribution, and not be concerned (mostly anyway) that it will break my applications in weird and wonderful ways that I could not predict. This isn't so useful for distribution of Python based desktop applications, but I don't do a lot of that (and probably would be looking for a good off-the-shelf solution if I did). -- Brian May <b...@debian.org>
