[virgildotcodes]

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been able to git clone any python project (that isn’t hello world equivalent), follow the readme and have it just run first shot.

I’m always having to dive in and figure out which packages are missing, wrong version, etc.

As I do this I find myself wondering if the repo maintainers make a habit of actually trying to set up their project from scratch just by following their readmes.

I’m assuming they just get out of date and then leave it to the community to troubleshoot their own installs.

For whatever reason I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulties trying to clone and run rust or node projects for example.

More generally, the fact that there are about 20 different ways to manage your venvs, and that you seemingly tend to accrete every version of python released in the last 20 years with no clear way of managing all those installations, makes it quite confusing for newbies.

[doix]

Do you have any examples? I've been out of the Python game for _ages_, but can't you pretty much always just:

  git clone ...
  python -m venv venv
  source ./venv/bin/activate
  pip install -r requirements.txt

Then work on that repo? Everything after "venv" is too new for me, and I've ignored it and somehow not had any issues. If there are some packages that rely on C code and don't have wheels or whatever, you need to deal with the C ecosystem which is the real hell in my opinion.

All the autotools/cmake/scons, library paths, header paths, PKG_CONFIG, etc. I've had so many issues building C projects that I can't even begin to remember all the issues.

[lmm]

> can't you pretty much always just:

> ...

> pip install -r requirements.txt

No. Usually that will pick up newer versions of the project's transitive dependencies, which will have breaking changes (because these days breaking changes in minor versions is what all the cool kids are doing). Since it's Python you won't find out until you hit the wrong codepath while using the program and get a runtime error.