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Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

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Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#111

Post by microtonal »

komuher wrote: post #62
microtonal wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, other languages ship package managers [1] that are widely loved within their ecosystems and cover everything from microcontrollers to server applications. I think what it makes it more difficult in the case of Python is that it has decades of legacy to deal with. No consistent semantic versioning, packages that expect that they can modify their package path in-place (this is a nightmare for immutable systems…

Kinda diffrent Rust its like 3 years old when it start getting popular. Python is 13+ years old when it starts getting very popular. You cannot compare legacy to modern solution -.-

Which is exactly what my second paragraph said :). This is a common struggle for many older programming language ecosystems, e.g. I think the same is true to some extend for C and C++.

As one of the sibling commenters mentions, there are good examples that it is possible to standardize packaging better. Maven replaced IDE-driven builds and Ant for in the Java ecosystem and added proper package management. Additionally, it required that projects start conforming to standardized layouts, by taking convention over configuration and being largely declarative. I think the Maven success story lost some of its shine with Gradle, but that's another story.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#112

Post by 1337shadow »

robertlagrant wrote: post #85
1337shadow wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't mess with the system-provided Python environments for specific applications you are working with Right, but then just use pip install --user instead of a virtualenv. Actually --user is the default now when running pip install from non-root user, so, just pip install as a user will work and not mess with the system packages, just don't do sudo pip install.

> Right, but then just use pip install --user instead of a virtualenv This seems almost as bad as system python. I suppose it's fine if you only work on one thing, but as soon as you don't, your dev environment will become chaotic and lots of confusing WFM will happen. E.g. this is why npm has a separate node_modules folder for each project.

> why npm has a separate node_modules folder for each project

This sacrifies time and disk space and hides tech debt under the carpet, I'd rather have a solution like `pip upgrade` that would upgrade all packages and fix the environment, like `pacman -Syu`, but people would have to stop pinning versions and actually maintain their codebases and the dependencies they uses.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#113

Post by oneweekwonder »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #79
komuher wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda diffrent Rust its like 3 years old when it start getting popular. Python is 13+ years old when it starts getting very popular. You cannot compare legacy to modern solution -.-

Which is why I'm starting to feel like Python is the new Java.

Strange, because python was released almost 5 years before java.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#114

Post by simonh »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #101
captainmuon wrote: post #74

Distros, please stop screwing over Python packaging. It is incredible that Debian/Ubuntu pick Python apart and put modules into different packages. They even create a fake venv command that tells you to please install python-venv. What they should just do is offer a bunch of packages like python3.7, python3.8 that install the official python package wholesale into /usr/python or someplace and then symlink one of them…

Yes, explaining to a beginer how to bootstrap python is hell because windows, mac and linux keeps making sure nothing work the same.

Actually, explaining how to get Python working on Windows is far, far easier than on either linux (modulo various distros) or the Mac. That's because there is one obvious distribution of Python to use, the official one, and new versions of it are always consistent and play well together.

Yes you can use Anaconda if you want, and people who do that are probably data scientists or something and know what they want to do and why. It's well documented and has it's own robust ecosystem.

I say this as someone who's been on Macs at home since 2007 and works professionally on Linux, but I started with Python on Windows back in 2002.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#115

Post by gjulianm »

1337shadow wrote: post #51
gjulianm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've run into problems when running pip install --user. Someone installs a package in the user environment, and that works. But later you'll install a package in a shared virtualenv (because a Python program needs to run as a service or by another users or whatever) and pip doesn't install it because it's already on the user environment. However, other users don't have access to that environment and they will have an…

Interesting problem but I think it's more a problem in virtualenv, which don't use global site package by default, I'm surprised that it uses user site packages by default. However, installing every dependency in the same environment is also what distro package managers do, I don't see that as a recipe for disaster, it all depends how well the said packages are maintained in which case just upgrading them should fix…

> However, installing every dependency in the same environment is also what distro package managers do, I don't see that as a recipe for disaster,

Distro packages are done in a way where it's hard to get conflicts. I haven't found an instance where python3-X and python3-Y can't be installed because one requires python3-Z v1.2 and the other python3-Z v2.1. With Python packages, that happens way more often.

Also, distro package managers keep track of everything installed, while python ones (at least pip I'm 100% sure) don't. You could install a package which upgrades another one, and that breaks another that you had installed before and pip won't say a word.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#116

Post by 1337shadow »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #108
cjfd wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the distributions would be more inclined to include up-to-date version if the standard in the python community was not to break everything all the time. There are distributions that keep up-to-date, though, e.g., archlinux. Serving the needs of python developers vs. sysadmins is a false dichotomy. Python developers develop on a system that they need to admin. One great thing about linux is that everything on…

Sure, so my lib works on mac, windows, centos and debian. Tell me how I'm supposed to define my lib python deps ? How am I suppose to package the lib ? Distribute it ? Deal with os versions differences? Allow isolation for my user projects ?

I'm sorry, doesn't pip already works there? Otherwise, there's pyinstaller which is great but it requires an entrypoint so it won't do with a pure lib that doesn't expose any script at all.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#117

Post by lmm »

> What is it about Linux distros that makes our use-case unimportant? Have we offered no value to Python over the past 30 years?

Indeed you haven't. Worse, you've actively damaged Python's efforts to improve. I mostly work on the JVM these days, and I think one of the main reasons dependency management there is so gloriously simple and effective is that the Debian packagers weren't around to fuck it up.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#118

Post by ginko »

ivirshup wrote: post #42
Sesse__ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users generally don't want Python packages; they want software. They don't care what it's written in, and shouldn't have to install it differently depending on what you chose. “Just learn $language_package_manager_of_the_day, and hope it doesn't break anything when your system changes” is the equivalent of the 90s “./configure ; make ; make install”, and we should have moved past that for end-users by now. Most users…

But our package is for scientific data analysis. It’s a python library. If you’re distributing an application, shouldn’t you just ship an environment with our package bundled?

I would expect libraries to be distributed as a separate distro package like every other library in the system. Why shouldn't it?

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#119

Post by Gigachad »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #84
elurg wrote: post #33

Python libraries shipped by distributions are so old that this mechanism is mostly useless for python development. This also applies to many others programming languages which have their own packaging systems. While python packaging is indeed messy the needs of traditional linux distributions are by far the least important. Python packaging needs to better serve the needs of python developers, not those of sysadmins.…

> All decisions related to dependency choices fundamentally belongs with upstream. No. As a user I want dependency management (and all of software distribution, to be honest) to be handled by the party that's best able to keep things working while at the same time keeping them secure. Linux distributions have a much, much better track record at that than most upstreams.

I really doubt that the python libraries packaged by Debian are any more secure or stable than the latest release of those libraries. At best they just limit to breaking updates to once every few years when they update them.

It’s essentially like version locking packages except some random Debian maintainer decides when it’s time to update.

Re: Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros

#120

Post by ajsnigrutin »

cjfd wrote: post #97
elurg wrote: post #33

Python libraries shipped by distributions are so old that this mechanism is mostly useless for python development. This also applies to many others programming languages which have their own packaging systems. While python packaging is indeed messy the needs of traditional linux distributions are by far the least important. Python packaging needs to better serve the needs of python developers, not those of sysadmins.…

Perhaps the distributions would be more inclined to include up-to-date version if the standard in the python community was not to break everything all the time. There are distributions that keep up-to-date, though, e.g., archlinux. Serving the needs of python developers vs. sysadmins is a false dichotomy. Python developers develop on a system that they need to admin. One great thing about linux is that everything on…

> Perhaps the distributions would be more inclined to include up-to-date version if the standard in the python community was not to break everything all the time.

Yep... Perl is a godsend... take a code from 20 years ago, run it on a modern system, and everything works.

Python? Three different software versions need three different versions of the same library, and new library versions are not backwards compatible with their older versions... Even Python 2.x -> 3.x was a pain in the ass too, and even within minor versions, you sometimes get breaking changes.

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