@darius did you mean "how to fuck up my entire computer by installing python"
@ranjit no because if I did then random people on the internet would be mean to me
@darius if it helps (it doesn't) I blame ubuntu for this more than python, python is just really cavalier about "ok so we will RUN the BINARY from your PATH, the rest is up to you, godspeed"
@darius this question generalizes frighteningly well across what i suspect may now be the majority of programming environments and operating systems
@darius I don't know if you're looking, but in my case I settled on pyenv with the virtualenv plugin for now since I need to be able to run with specific versions of python.
https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv
(I hesitate suggesting anything because software development sometimes seems way too much all the time these days.)
@cstanhope oh yeah, stuff like this *works*, it just destroys my mental model of my operating system environment...
@darius Yeah, and then you combine it with other languages and runtimes you may be using. It's such a mess. :/
"did you mean python3? regardless, no results."
From the creators of "just please give me a self-contained binary that I can run, and no, I don't want any of its 50 dependencies".
No, installing ffmpeg doesn't mean I want 70 packages of desktop-related stuff for the off chance that I'll want to play something on my server.
@darius im working on a project for a client that was originally written in python (its a compiler that generates python) but python package management between linux and windows proved so &@^&* intractable it was just easier to learn rust and rewrite the whole thing. now we have a horrifyingly fast compiler. computers were a mistake but python is particularly awful.
@darius I once found someone with my exact problem with installing an OS on a forum after hours of searching only to discover the question was posted by myself like 8 years earlier with no valid answer…
@darius I use pyenv for this. A really nice tool that manages python versions and virtual environments locally. All it needs is system dependencies to build python.
@reed @avolkov I have definitely run into major issues with pyenv, mostly because I don't understand anything about python -- I'm always installing python as dependency for something else. I imagine if I understood python better, then using pyenv would be easy for me like using nvm is for node. As it stands I've found pyenv weird and confusing because I lack necessary mental models
@frodo and they didn't even mention Conda env :p
@darius It's the exact reverse for me :D Whenever i use node/npm, I run into fantastic issues and I have no idea what's going and it's frustrating, so I go back to Python where everything runs as I expect it.
So yes, I guess it's a matter of understand and familiarity with that particular ecosystem ;)
went to install python on ubuntu and was punked by my former self