[mixmastamyk]

Indeed, they broke a few features in the last few years and made the excuse "we can't support them, we're volunteers." Well, how about stop breaking things that worked for a decade? That would take less effort.

They had time to force "--break-system-packages" on us though, something no one asked for.

[zahlman]

> how about stop breaking things that worked for a decade?

They aren't doing this.

> They had time to force "--break-system-packages" on us though, something no one asked for.

The maintainers of several Linux distros asked for it very explicitly, and cooperated to design the feature. The rationale is extensively documented in the proposal (https://peps.python.org/pep-0668/). This is especially important for distros where the system package manager is itself implemented in Python, since corrupting the system Python environment could produce a state that is effectively unrecoverable (at least without detailed Python-specific know-how).

[mixmastamyk]

Oh really?

- https://github.com/pypa/packaging/issues/774

- https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/3548

- https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/7953

I relied on those for a decade, maybe two.

> something no one asked for

Was being a facetious, sure someone asked for it, but it was pretty dumb. This has never "corrupted" anything, is rare (not happened to me in last 15 years), and simply fixed when knowledgeable.

Not everyone can simply fix it, so a better solution would be to isolate the system python, allow more than one installed, etc. Distros already do this to some extent.