Sometimes an Ubuntu package of a Python module is probably good enough

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2 pointspabs34 comments

I’m generally of the opinion that you either go all in for OS distributed Python packages, or you manage all versions yourself.

When I first learnt Python about 10 years ago, I found it much more common to install things from package managers because at the time, wheels had only just been proposed with PEP427 and so there was a lot more compiling from source if you installed things from PyPi. For similar reasons, Conda was popular.

These days, as long as you’re on a reasonably well supported platform (x86_64, ARM, and not Alpine Linux) and recent-ish version of Python (>3.7), then you can probably get a new binary version of most dependencies very quickly.

I tend to just repackage every Python package as an OS package, these days the tools to do that are reasonably good, and it forces you to inspect the contents for licensing and other junk/cruft/badness.

Have you tried out Spack? I used this quite a bit in academia to install the scientific sorts of libraries many Python packages depends on without needing to rely on the OS versions which were often out of date.

I'd probably just use the OS backports, or backport it myself rather than Spack.

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