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I'm not a Linux distro expert, I'm not even a python expert, all I noticed is that my code didn't work with the OS-managed PIL/urllib3 and installing the versio

by Eridrus 10y ago

I'm not a Linux distro expert, I'm not even a python expert, all I noticed is that my code didn't work with the OS-managed PIL/urllib3 and installing the versions from pip in virtualenv fixed things. I don't know the reasons, just that was my experience. Maybe it was just the OS versions being old, I don't know. The maintainer approach works well for everything you maintain, it just sucks for everything else, including installing out of repo software or writing your own software. It's made particularly bad by Python's packaging system which defaults to global installs. FWIW, I lay this one more at the door of Python than I do Ubuntu, you guys are just dealing with their packaging system and I think that "Python packaging is a good now" is just ignoring the shitty parts. Frankly it's easier for me to just always run my code inside a virtualenv than it is for you guys to make some drastic changes to make my life marginally easier, when I don't even really know what the problem was. It's just that this is a non-obvious thing to do for someone who hasn't been in the python ecosystem for long.

rlpb 10y ago
It sounds like all you needed was a newer version. Most distributions deliberately try to ship a version that was current at the time of release and don't update it later except for bugfixes. This is for the user stability reason I gave above. This is what a distribution release is, and why many Ubuntu users prefer the LTS release over every six-monthly release. If this is the case here, then this isn't a Python-specific problem at all. Developers have a choice: use the chosen distribution release version, or if that's not new enough, then find another way. For Python, one (commonly accepted and good) answer happens to be virtualenv. Many choose, because of their particular circumstances, to go all virtualenv and ignore distribution packages altogether. Can I guess that you used an Ubuntu LTS, so you effectively opted in to packages that are older but don't change often? Some solve this by never using a distribution version at all, which is fine. But understand that this is the nature of what a distribution is, and applies to the entire ecosystem, not just the Python one.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  It's possible I had an old version, but I was trying to do super basic things with PIL on 14.04 LTS; literally just cropping a JPEG and things were failing. Do I have this problem in Java/Node/Go/Rust? No, I don't. The reason I don't have this problem is that dependencies are not installed globally, they are defined per-project and often statically linked in, there is no such thing as a conflict between two of those projects.
  - rlpb 10y ago
    > It's possible I had an old version, but I was trying to do super basic things with PIL on 14.04 LTS; literally just cropping a JPEG and things were failing. It sounds to me that you hit some kind of straightforward bug then, rather than some systemic issue.

by Eridrus 10y ago

rlpb 10y ago

It sounds like all you needed was a newer version. Most distributions deliberately try to ship a version that was current at the time of release and don't update it later except for bugfixes. This is for the user stability reason I gave above. This is what a distribution release is, and why many Ubuntu users prefer the LTS release over every six-monthly release. If this is the case here, then this isn't a Python-specific problem at all. Developers have a choice: use the chosen distribution release version, or if that's not new enough, then find another way. For Python, one (commonly accepted and good) answer happens to be virtualenv. Many choose, because of their particular circumstances, to go all virtualenv and ignore distribution packages altogether. Can I guess that you used an Ubuntu LTS, so you effectively opted in to packages that are older but don't change often? Some solve this by never using a distribution version at all, which is fine. But understand that this is the nature of what a distribution is, and applies to the entire ecosystem, not just the Python one.

Eridrus 10y ago
It's possible I had an old version, but I was trying to do super basic things with PIL on 14.04 LTS; literally just cropping a JPEG and things were failing. Do I have this problem in Java/Node/Go/Rust? No, I don't. The reason I don't have this problem is that dependencies are not installed globally, they are defined per-project and often statically linked in, there is no such thing as a conflict between two of those projects.
- rlpb 10y ago
  > It's possible I had an old version, but I was trying to do super basic things with PIL on 14.04 LTS; literally just cropping a JPEG and things were failing. It sounds to me that you hit some kind of straightforward bug then, rather than some systemic issue.