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Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

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Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#11

Post by noodlesUK »

hkt wrote: post #7
noodlesUK wrote: post #2

I am not one to install python packages using my distro's package manager, but I totally agree with the sentiment that we need a more standard build/dependency management system in python. I like poetry, and I think most people are heading that way, but it doesn't seem to play super nice with pyenv (which is a critical tool) a lot of the time, and I think that a first party endorsement of the "one true build system"…

Golang is a great model to follow. I think the fundamental thing that python (and ruby, when I still used it) has taught me is to run a mile if a language is without a robust dependency management system. The pain is just not worth it, even for a nice language with an otherwise robust ecosystem.

With golang, it's not just the dependency management side, gofmt (and various bits of other tooling) is also an incredible blessing. Yes, prescriptivism can sometimes feel weird to us computer nerds, but sometimes it's just much better to have a canonical way of doing common tasks. It means onboarding people is much easier, and infrastructure/code/whatever is more reusable.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#12

Post by nerdponx »

> Every one of these package managers is designed for a reckless world in which programmers chuck packages wholesale into ~/.pip, set up virtualenvs and pin their dependencies to 10 versions and 6 vulnerabilities ago, and ship their computers directly into production in Docker containers which aim to do the minimum amount necessary to make their user’s private data as insecure as possible.

Is this any different from any other programming language ecosystem? Is Python really doing worse than Node, Ruby, Perl, Lua, Go, or Haskell in this regard?

Python files go in `/usr/lib/pythonx.y`, Python finds said files, programs run.

Yes, Python build and packaging in general is messy. But I am curious why, specifically from a distro perspective, it's any worse than anything else.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#13

Post by withinboredom »

noodlesUK wrote: post #2

I am not one to install python packages using my distro's package manager, but I totally agree with the sentiment that we need a more standard build/dependency management system in python. I like poetry, and I think most people are heading that way, but it doesn't seem to play super nice with pyenv (which is a critical tool) a lot of the time, and I think that a first party endorsement of the "one true build system"…

I’m not a Python dev. I do need to occasionally run things written in Python. I made the mistake of trying to get pip + Conda + pyenv (or whatever) to install a fairly simple tool. I have no idea how the dev got their setup working, but it was totally and utterly unreproducable, even after they sat down on my computer for several hours. In that amount of time, I could have probably rewritten it in PHP (that’s actually exactly what I ended up doing while they attempted to get a Docker container running).

Needless to say, I will only use the distro package manager these days. I know the versions are (probably) compatible, maintainers will usually backport security patches, etc. You get none of that using whatever flavor of the week python package manager.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#16

Post by turminal »

geofft wrote: post #6

This is a very weird post to read, as someone who does (occasional) distro Python work - I feel like Python absolutely is listening to us! It's just that it's hard work, and distro packaging is mostly done by volunteers, and there are a whole lot of things to work through. Here's some work I and others did earlier this year, which I thought was a great example of folks from the core Python packaging world and folks f…

"use virtualenvs and install your dependencies from an unfiltered, unsupervised, untrusted source" is certainly the solution most aligned with the rest of the industry but I struggle to see any technical benefit from it. Other than perhaps "move faster and break more things".

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#17

Post by atoav »

noodlesUK wrote: post #2

I am not one to install python packages using my distro's package manager, but I totally agree with the sentiment that we need a more standard build/dependency management system in python. I like poetry, and I think most people are heading that way, but it doesn't seem to play super nice with pyenv (which is a critical tool) a lot of the time, and I think that a first party endorsement of the "one true build system"…

I landed with poetry as well. The issue with python dependency managment in my book is, that it is incredibly (and needlessly) hard to learn how to do it properly. It took me years to figure out how things should work and there are still issues now and then that cost me a few hours to figure out and restore things.

Meanwhile when I use Rust all these things are taken care of in cargo. It is part of the language. There is one right way to do things and the way is supported by comfortable tooling, that works so well that you literally don't even consider thinking about anything else.

The way python does dependencies is totally unpythonic. The fact that it is 2021 and this isn't fixed or at least the number one priority of things that need fixing sheds a dark shadow on the whole language – a language that I like to use.

Poetry is good. But it isn't as good as cargo, because it also has to deal with all the legacy cruft. To run code developed with poetry on a non-poetry system you have to figure out all the ways of dealing with envs, paths and such.

Issues like these get me a little fired up, because the collective brainpower wasted on something that should have been elegantly solved in one place is gigantic.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#18

Post by tuldia »

Am I the only one that is not having issues with python and distributions in general?

I get all my dependencies from Debian and they all work, when I need something that is not yet packaged, I use pip.

What are people doing to get all this issues? I don't understand...

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#19

Post by ivirshup »

Can someone make the case for distributing python packages at the distro level to me? Especially scientific software for data analysis?

Our project gets a few issues opened by distro maintainers who have trouble with some part of their build process. Is it really worth our project maintainers time to help troubleshoot esoteric build processes when we already provide source, wheel, and conda distributions?

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#20

Post by formerly_proven »

salawat wrote: post #10
rbanffy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtual environments are a good way to have different packages for different applications running on different versions of Python. My usual rule is you don't mess with the system-provided Python environments for specific applications you are working with. I would even suggest dropping support for many packages at the distro level unless they are required by other non-python packages (the same way Django and Twisted a…

Apt and desktop environments need to break their Python dependencies then, or stop doing daft things like colliding different 3.x run levels on the same runtime path. Go ahead and install pip3 from Python 3.6. use that to install pip3 for 3.8, and try using apt. Backup first.

Your last sentence doesn't parse for me at all. How exactly do you get a pip installed on Python 3.6 to modify anything about another install of Python, let alone a different version?
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