On 1/14/2025 6:32 AM, Chris Green via Python-list wrote:
I have a (relatively) clean Debian 12 installation running on my two
workhorse systems, a desktop server at home and my laptop that travels
around with me.
I moved from Xubuntu to Debian on both these systems a few months ago.
I ran Xubuntu for many years and acquired a whole lot of python
packages installed with pip, as root. For the last couple of years I
had to use the --break-system-packages option to get things installed.
As far as I'm aware I never hit any dependency problems doing this.
It's probably because things I installed with pip were mostly quite
small, specialised, packages that I used in just one or two utility
programs that I had written myself. In quite a few cases these were
realated to image processing and such things.
So far I've managed to keep my Debian 12 installations 'pip free', I
haven't even got pip installed. However I may have just come across
something that would at least be very useful and it comes from PyPi.
(It's tkintertable if that's of any interest or relevance)
What are my options?
Just install it using pip as root and --break-system-packages,
what's likely to break?
You can also install with --user and --break-system-packages, but that
doesn't really solve the problem. Also, as just happened to me, if an
upgrade happens to change the system's python to a newer version (e.g.,
3.12.x to 3.13.y), you would have to install all your packages again
with the new Python install.
Use a virtual environment, what do I have to do then to make using
my program (that uses tkintertable) 'transparent', i.e. I just
want to be able to run the program from the command prompt like
any other program.
You can write a shell script that activates the venv and then launches
your program. This works pretty well.
Download tkintertable from git into my development environment and
use that. My PYTHONPATH will need to point to it but I can't see
any further issues with doing this.
This is an approach I use sometimes, mainly if I have cloned a project.
I run the project's program(s) using a script that sets the PYTHONPATH.
Anything else? As far as I can see using pipx doesn't help me at
all (see recent thread here).
To completely avoid problems when the system's Python install gets
changed, you can install your own Python version outside of the package
manager; it doesn't have to be the same version as the system's. I've
done this when I wanted to run a later version of Python than the
system's. You would have to take care of updating it yourself since the
package manager won't know about it. On the system where I did this, I
ran the system's python version using "python3" and my own using
"python3.11" (I think the system was still on 3.8 or 3.9).
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