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by ptx 2210 days ago
> struggling to get Python installed and into their `PATH` ... it's frankly still amateur hour over there

But that has been solved on Windows for quite a while hasn't it?

Python installs the "py" launcher on the path, which allows you to run whichever version you want of those you have installed. Just type "py" instead of "python". Or "py -3.5-32" to specifically run 32-bit Python 3.5, or "py -0" to list the available versions.
1 comments
a_cool_username 2210 days ago
It's gotten a lot better, but we still hit tons of issues with users who don't know what Python version they installed their application in. Oh and of course our "binaries" in Scripts/bin don't seem to show up in the PATH by default. So I get to tell people "py -3.8-64 -m foo" on windows, "foo" everywhere else.

This gets much much worse when a new version of Python comes out and we don't support it yet (because of the build system issues I mentioned). I spent several weeks teaching people how to uninstall 3.8 and install 3.7 before we finally got a functioning package out for 3.8.

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sergeykish 2210 days ago
I like Mozilla build system on Windows, you click "start-shell.bat" and it runs console. Python, mercurial, rust - just works, never checked PATH.

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/windows_build....

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ptx 2210 days ago
Sure, but telling people to run "py -3.7" seems a lot easier than walking them through uninstalling and reinstalling Python, as you would have had to in the bad old days. It's reliable and consistent and doesn't depend of what's installed where or how it's configured. If you run "py -3.7 -m venv my_env", it just works, always, with no special context required.

Although I don't handle user support for Python packages, if I did, that would be my go-to approach.

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