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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

In practical terms, if you're using the distribution's interpreters for anything other than running code supplied by the distro, you're going to be in a world of pain. That is the whole point of a distro: to supply a known-good set of mutually compatible software.

Expect to be building your own environments if you want to run things that are not in your distro.

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I can't relate. I'm a Python programmer and I don't think I ever used a Python version other than the one provided by my distro. Unless you run a very outdated/"stable" distribution, interpreter versions are no more than few years old. Most serious projects don't just jump on the new language version on the day it's released, certainly not my projects, so I never had the need to run a bleeding edge interpreter.

> Unless you run a very outdated/"stable" distribution

LTS is exactly this pain!

I really don't understand why anybody would use that for development. Your SW won't land anyway in the current "stable" distri release, but at the earliest in the "next" version. So you need to develop against that "next" version anyway. The "next" version is something like Debian Testing…

And if you don't plan to release your SW properly into a distri you need to bring your own environment anyway.

I think that the GP has hit on something deeply true (distros are mutually compatible bundles of software which aren't guaranteed or even intended to work with your dev environment). I think it is also true that this is not usually a problem for Python in practice for small-to-medium projects.

I will note that most places I have worked professionally with Python code have compiled their own CPython interpreter and not relied on the distro version.

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