On 12/1/19 10:41 AM, Michael Torrie wrote: > On 11/30/19 9:42 PM, John Ladasky wrote: >> Can anyone provide concrete examples of problems arising from >> installing modules on top of the system Python? Am I courting >> disaster? > No you aren't. I've also never had any problems. I've installed many > things into my root system Python installation with pip including PyQt5. > It's just easier for me to have them in the system installation. I'm > on a CentOS 7 box, which depends on Python 2 for a lot of system > functions. I've moved to Python 3 now, so I mess with the system Python > less and less. I understand that I probably should be using a > virtualenv and pip installing into that, but I'm just too lazy. > > A couple of years ago I even managed to upgrade the system Python from > 2.6 to 2.7 without any issues. I ended up making an RPM that neatly > upgraded the system one. I also have upgraded the gtk2 bindings and the > GTK2 library itself (again building RPMs), and everything worked fine, > even the graphical centos utilities. > > The only problems I've ever heard of come from trying to manually remove > stuff from Python that the system depended on. I've never heard of any > problems installing additional modules. 90% of the time the module you > need will be in the repositories, so no worries there at all. And not > much to worry about for the rest.
My guess is that the issue is with some more complicated/esoteric packages. Especially if there are ones that don't maintain strict backwards compatibility, so that some packages using them have a maximum usable version as well as a minimum usable version. This can lead to troubles as some packages become incompatible because one needs a version greater than x, while another needs a version less than x. -- Richard Damon -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
