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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

I'll remember that "Homebrew does this very well" the next time I have to fix a bunch of shit because it has updated the currently-active version, or removed this or that bugfix release, as part of a general upgrade. After the third time this happened, I started using pyenv - which is another mountain of brokenness, I grant you, but at least I have some degree of control on what happens when.

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pyenv is pretty good for working around this problem. I've recently switched to asdf-vm which I like even more, since it handles versions for multiple languages and tools.

I have been meaning to try out ASDF-VM. Currently my shell initialization script has at least 4 of these "version managers". While I don't really mind them (and they are mostly well-behaved), it might be nice to have something a bit more centralized.

In addition to python version issues, I was also running into JVM and gradle version compatibility issues, which I was handling with jenv and some aliases that would swap JAVAHOME environment variable as needed. asdf-vm cleaned all that up in a very clean way, and I like the way you can set .tool-versions file for a project and share with other asdf-vm users.

I'm using Anaconda, it's so far hands down the best way to manage python and its packages. It just works.

hands down the best way to manage python and its packages.

Agreed, especially on Windows.

It just works.

This is pushing it. It's not hard to break conda or put yourself in situation where the updater/dependency checker gets stuck and doesn't know what to do, especially once you start adding conda-forge packages. But it does do a better job than anything else I've tried (although poetry + pyenv on Linux is getting much better)

Maybe I've just been lucky so far but I have yet to see Anaconda break anything over a period of several years. So far so good :)

Thanks!

FWIW, we are soon going to be releasing a much faster depedency resolver. We are also thinking hard about how best to address the "growing ecosystem" problem, in a future-proof way.

FWIW, we are soon going to be releasing a much faster depedency resolver

Fantastic. Easily my biggest complaint about conda.

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