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Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

I know this is frustrating, and I expect it affects more than just Python developers, but I think the author sums it up pretty well here:

> Homebrew’s Python is not for you. It exists to serve Homebrew, or more accurately, Homebrew’s other formulae. The primary purpose of Homebrew’s Python formula is to enable other Python-dependent Homebrew packages to work.

If you want to develop Python (likely Ruby/ PHP/ whatever), you are best keeping your dev environment separate from the interpreters installed for the purpose of running apps managed by Home-brew (or apt/ rpm/ etc).

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Speaking as a Homebrew maintainer (and separately as someone who does both Ruby and Python development locally): this is the correct answer.

Homebrew's guarantees are no different from those of apt or any other system package manager; the only difference is that we don't have a stable distribution version to lock our Python or Ruby versions against. Individual developers will always be best served to isolate their development environments from the overarching runtime environment that's been distributed to them.

I think it would be wonderful if this last sentence could be expanded into its own section of the "Homebrew and Python" docs. [1]

[1] https://docs.brew.sh/Homebrew-and-Python.html

Thanks, I'll base the language in the PR off of it. If you give me your GitHub handle, I'll tag you when I create the PR.

Certainly — that would be great. You can find me at: http://github.com/justinmayer

It was already merged, so I'll just go ahead and link it here: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/10513

Thanks again for bringing it to our attention!

Would it make sense to enforce this by making the Homebrew python keg-only? Would other Homebrew packages that need Python still work? This way I can keep my own separate installation of Python that does not interfere with Homebrew.

> Would it make sense to enforce this by making the Homebrew python keg-only?

Maybe. I wasn't privy to any discussions around making Python keg-only, but my experience with other formulae that are keg-only is that users will force-link keg-only packages into `/usr/local` anyways. What's more, there are probably enough people out there who do just want a barebones Python 3 installation and don't really care if it gets upgraded underneath them, and we'd like to provide that by default.

The Python ecosystem already contains mature tooling on both Linux and macOS for managing Python installations that are isolated from Homebrew and other system-level package managers, like pyenv. In general, I'd recommend using pyenv in parallel with Homebrew; that will get you the best of both worlds.

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