Hacker News Reader

> And macports has binary distributions now so the awful rebuild-the-world updates aren't as much of a problem anymore

That's really awesome.

> ... has separate packages for every version of python so I can have them all installed at once for testing

Are the package versions themselves configured to be installed side by side? Or are you using multiple copies of macports[1]?

[1] https://guide.macports.org/#installing.macports.source.multi...

View on HN

they work side by side, you can just call "python27" vs "python34" and the same happens for related tools (pip, pep8 etc).

The un-suffixed version ("python") refers to a default that can be switched with a single command affecting all related tools. It's great.

This is not python specific either, it also works with perl, ruby, etc

now this is a pointless feature.

time to get familiar with https://github.com/yyuu/pyenv

The fact that there is a super-specialized tool to do this demonstrates that it's not a pointless feature. It's much nicer to be able to use macports to install all the versions of python that I need instead of using brew to install pyenv and then pyenv to install python (and then pip to install python packages...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com