[bandrami]

And this isn't new: it was true for gems with Ruby, it was true for pear with PHP, it was true for CPAN with perl. I don't do javascript at all but I assume it's doubly true for npm just because that place seems to make even pypi look conservative and glacial. I've mostly come around to the belief that if an piece of software has a package manager you should just use it instead of your system package manager. But man do I miss the days of CPAN packages that might update once a year.

[mikepurvis]

Generally I'm in agreement, but the one place that starts to fall apart is with bindings— if there's a native code library, then I really would prefer that library come in from the native package manager rather than be smuggled in by pip... but that's not generally how it works these days, and outside of Nix there isn't a great way to resolve this case.