[Neuroimaging] Technical details managing Python versions and packages.

[Jesus-Omar Ocegueda-Gonzalez]

Hello Python experts!,
I just wanted to ask if anyone of you could point me out to a good
reference to learn a good way to manage different python versions and their
corresponding packages. This is a bit embarrassing, but I guess the
following story may seem familiar to some people (probably those days when
you were python newbies): I had python 2.7 with a lot of packages already
installed, some of them installed with pip, some with easy_install, some
with apt-get, some built manually from source code... who knows? I just
sequentially tried each installation way, following instructions I found in
random internet pages whenever something went wrong, until one of the
installation instructions suddenly worked, and just moved on. Then, at some
point, I tried to install Python 3 to reproduce a bug reported to only
happen there, just to discover that now nothing works, I have no numpy, no
nibabel, none of the basic packages, so I tried to "re-install" them
(following instructions from random internet pages when something goes
wrong... again), see the pattern?. So the root cause is obviously that I
have no idea of what's going on behind scenes when I use these "mysterious"
installers, and how they affect my environment, which of them are
compatible with each other and which are not, etc.

So, to break the pattern, I think this is time to really learn exactly
what's going on when we "install" packages with different tools, and how to
correctly manage different versions. Could anyone point me out to a good
reference to learn these details (e.g. Is there a good way to actually
remove everything so we can start a totally fresh installation)?

Thank you very much in advance!.
With warm regards,
-A frustrated -but motivated- Python user.
-- 
"Cada quien es dueño de lo que calla y esclavo de lo que dice"
-Proverbio chino.
"We all are owners of what we keep silent and slaves of what we say"
-Chinese proverb.

http://www.cimat.mx/~omar
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/neuroimaging/attachments/20150731/1c8f800a/attachment.html>