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Comment by unxdfa | Hacker News Reader

This makes me so happy. Back when we had Jenkins slaves, one of our devops guys set a pipeline up that pip installed different versions over the top of system packages causing weird intermittent failures everywhere. Different pipelines would be running in different requirements files. I revoked sudo privs immediately for Jenkins (I didn't add them in the first place) and reprovisioned the whole build cluster resulting in pipelines breaking consistently where they should have been breaking: trying to do stupid stuff.

Personally I only ever use the system python packages on Linux if I can get away with it. Saves a whole world of problems.

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> Back when we had Jenkins slaves, one of our devops guys set a pipeline up that pip installed different versions over the top of system packages causing weird intermittent failures everywhere.

Not everyone might like containers, but using them for CI seems like a good way to avoid situations like this, at least when viable (e.g. web development). You get to choose what container images you need for your build, do whatever is necessary inside of them and they're essentially thrown away after once you're done with what you need to do, cache aside. They also don't have any significant impact or dependencies on the system configuration either, as long as you have some sort of a supported container runtime.

Second containers (however controversial they may otherwise be). The official python Alpine container is < 20mb and the slim Debian variants are < 45mb. For many of my Python projects I end up needing to install various system dependency libs like CUDA, libav, libsndfile, etc. I tend to be a "fan" of containers generally and containers seem like the best way to handle situations like mine.

> I revoked sudo privs immediately for Jenkins (I didn't add them in the first place)

If you allowed sudo in your jenkins jobs you're morally barred from blaming python for screwing up the system.

The problem here started right at the hiring manager.

Something something butterfly in China.

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