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Is this your comic, perhaps?

rimunroe 8y ago
Nah, but I was helping the author clean up his Python environment on Friday, which I think prompted this comic. His environment isn't even the messiest I've seen. I helped an astronomer friend with theirs at one point, and it had something like six different "manage your whole Python workflow easily with just this tool!" things installed. I think what a lot of comments here miss is that while new tools come out that can help make things better, they don't suddenly fix people's existing installs. It seems weird that there isn't more documentation out there to help people get out of these kinds of messes.
- cossatot 8y ago
  No disagreement from me on the sorry state of things.
- pwang 8y ago
  Exactly right. There is an irreversible entropy to this: once a certain number of implementations exist, it becomes almost impossible to create a "new standard" that fixes them all, because it has to be backwards compatible with too many of them. As someone responsible for probably one of your astronomer friend's tools (Anaconda), I have to say that we can only do so much: the nature of Python itself is that we cannot ignore what the user puts into PYTHONPATH, PATH, etc. On Windows, at least, we do create shortcuts in the Start Menu to ensure that we get a well-defined command shell. But if the user forces things like PYTHONPATH, there's not much we can do to un-fsck the setup. Maybe it would be useful to have a python-safemode (or python-portable) binary that explicitly ignores all environment variables, configuration files, registry settings, dotfiles, etc. etc. and only looks at files that are next to it in the path....
  - RayDonnelly 8y ago
    We've been discussing this, R users have asked for the same. The argument is that Anaconda should give them isolation. I think it should be opt-in though, probably. Tricky thing is that to do it you need to muck about in the internals of CPython and R and that'll upset some other people.

Nah, but I was helping the author clean up his Python environment on Friday, which I think prompted this comic. His environment isn't even the messiest I've seen. I helped an astronomer friend with theirs at one point, and it had something like six different "manage your whole Python workflow easily with just this tool!" things installed. I think what a lot of comments here miss is that while new tools come out that can help make things better, they don't suddenly fix people's existing installs. It seems weird that there isn't more documentation out there to help people get out of these kinds of messes.

cossatot 8y ago
No disagreement from me on the sorry state of things.
pwang 8y ago
Exactly right. There is an irreversible entropy to this: once a certain number of implementations exist, it becomes almost impossible to create a "new standard" that fixes them all, because it has to be backwards compatible with too many of them. As someone responsible for probably one of your astronomer friend's tools (Anaconda), I have to say that we can only do so much: the nature of Python itself is that we cannot ignore what the user puts into PYTHONPATH, PATH, etc. On Windows, at least, we do create shortcuts in the Start Menu to ensure that we get a well-defined command shell. But if the user forces things like PYTHONPATH, there's not much we can do to un-fsck the setup. Maybe it would be useful to have a python-safemode (or python-portable) binary that explicitly ignores all environment variables, configuration files, registry settings, dotfiles, etc. etc. and only looks at files that are next to it in the path....
- RayDonnelly 8y ago
  We've been discussing this, R users have asked for the same. The argument is that Anaconda should give them isolation. I think it should be opt-in though, probably. Tricky thing is that to do it you need to muck about in the internals of CPython and R and that'll upset some other people.