I joined a hackathon this weekend on a Python project. I’m brand new to Python, but I know how to code and set up my Linux environment (so I thought). First, I

I joined a hackathon this weekend on a Python project. I’m brand new to Python, but I know how to code and set up my Linux environment (so I thought). First, I install python3 packages I think I need from apt and set up vscode plugins for Julia notebooks. Great,I have a repl environment and can use Python library we’re working on. Now I want to hack the library code. The project docs say to run “just make”. Ok, that’s a rust tool, so I’ll install cargo via apt and get that installed. The Justfile install just has a pip install with dependencies listed, which appear to be defined in pyproject.toml. I run just install, and at the end it throws errors about dependencies. In the end, I used conda to set up the environment and get everything installed. But it seems like if the environment doesn’t have something, it gets it from the system instead of installing its own. The project used setuptools. The python3-pip apt package requires puthon3-setuptools v59. PEP 660 adds editable installs, implemented in setuptools v64. My takeaway is that you should not use your system installed Python packages for development, and should install as few as needed by your system or else you have to set up more overrides in your project.