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For me none of the things that are suppose to "relieve packaging pain" have ever done anything but cause more pain.

Plain virtual environments with venv work fine. If you need a different version of python, download the source, build it and install with make altinstall, then use it to make your venv.

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Thank you for your post, I was looking for something like altinstall, I wasn't aware of it. I've used dnf to install python3.8 side by side with the default python3.6 on Almalinux and they seem to work fine, but I keep wondering if I haven't broken something.

As long as you're installing/updating Python via your distro's package manager you won't break anything. Most horror stories of borked system Pythons are caused by people uninstalling/updating packages from the system Python via pip or fiddling with their PATH. altinstall is only useful if you have to compile Python from source to get it onto your system.

Thanks!

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