Comment by ahartmetz
5 hours ago
It's funny that no one seems to even consider using the distro package manager when it's time to complain about Python package management again. The deployment environment is usually well-known thus scriptable, and developers can be expected to know how to install packages on their own distros. And, of course, if the package is deployed as part of a distro, everything is taken care of by the distro people.
Flatpak is somewhere in the middle because it can and does centrally update dependencies, though they are packaged in larger boxes and it's tempting to include more exotic stuff in the app package instead of creating and maintaining a separate Flatpak shared with other dependees.
Nobody seriously considers it because usually, especially in enterprise distros, the major versions are years out of date and missing many features. And many smaller packages just won't be available. Even for something as major as Django it just wasn't viable to use the OS package manager when I tried it in the Debian 8 and then 9 days.
Only one company I've worked at maintained their own distro packages for deploying services. That was 13+ years ago. Every company since then had a containerized deployment strategy, some better than others. My most recent employer went through a massive effort to implement "golden base images" and tooling to ensure when the base image is updated all the dependents are rebuilt and redeployed. Most don't do that.