Comment by zahlman
11 hours ago
> Linux systems commonly already provide an outdated system Python you don’t want to use
Even with LTS Ubuntu updated only at EOL, Python will not be EOL most of the time.
> A single Python version for the entire system fundamentally doesn’t work for many people thanks to shitty compat story in the vast ecosystem.
My experience has been radically different. Everyone is trying their hardest to provide wheels for a wide range of platforms, and all the most popular projects succeed. Try adding `--only-binary=:all:` to your pip invocations and let me know the next time that actually causes a failure.
Besides which, I was very specifically talking about the user story for people who are just learning to program and will use Python for it. Because otherwise this problem is trivially solved by anyone competent. In particular, building and installing Python from source is just the standard configure / make / make install dance, and it Just Works. I have done it many times and never needed any help to figure it out even though it was the first thing I tried to build from C source after switching to Linux.
For much of the ML/scientific ecosystem, you're lucky to get all your deps working with the latest minor version of Python six months to a year after its release. Random ML projects with hundreds to thousands of stars on GitHub may only work with a specific, rather ancient version of Python.
> Because otherwise this problem is trivially solved by anyone competent. In particular, building and installing Python from source is just the standard configure / make / make install dance, and it Just Works. I have done it many times and never needed any help to figure it out even though it was the first thing I tried to build from C source after switching to Linux.
I compiled the latest GCC many times with the standard configure / make / make install dance when I just started learning *nix command line. I even compiled gmp, mpfr, etc. many times. It Just Works. Do you compile your GCC every time before you compile your Python? Why not? It Just Works.
> Why not?
Time. CPython compiles in a few minutes on an underpowered laptop. I don't recall last time I compiled GCC, but I had to compile LLVM and Clang recently, and it took significantly longer than "a few minutes" on a high-end desktop.
Sure. You do a source install every time you require a python version newer than system python.
I'll be using uv for that though, as I'll be using it for its superior package management anyway.