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by davidmurdoch
1214 days ago
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I'm convinced that there are very few python libraries that Just Work if you follow their installation instructions. I've never found one that didn't come with issues myself. Complain about this to a Python dev and you'll be "Well actually"ied to oblivion and each and every one will have their own opinion-as-fact on the best practice for managing these -- totally unaware how antithetical Python development has become from The Zen of Python. |
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Python dev's know we have a problem, it's just hard to fix because "people developing apps and worrying about dependencies" is a rather small part of the python community. It's not like Java or something where everybody writing the language is a developer. Most are scientists or business people or students working in places like anaconda or Jupyter. So it's really hard to get momentum behind an all-together-now solution.
I've slowly been gravitating toward Nix flakes so I can use it to pin to a project versions of all of the things you can't reliably install with pip alone (like python itself, or numpy, or postgres or whatever) and then have it read deps from poetry (via poetry2nix) for everything that "just works," but that's never gonna fly with the non-developer Python community. Hell, it probably won't even fly with half of the developers either, but it works well for me.
I think my situation is typical of python developers, which is why we have this problem. I think it'll stick around for a while because it's not like "just use a different language" is gonna fly with the non-dev crowd. They're going to expect somebody else to solve these problems for them.
(I may have a bias because my company offers OSS python apps in a SaaS form factor, so our support folk are the ones solving these problems--typically by either handling the virtualenv behind the scenes or by ensuring that users with conflicting dependencies are using different images).