[Python-Dev] Binary CPython distribution for Linux

[Nick Coghlan]

On 27 Jun 2014 17:33, "Bohuslav Kabrda" <bkabrda at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> It's not true that 2.7 wasn't released until few weeks ago. It was
released few weeks ago as part of RHEL 7, but Red Hat has been shipping Red
Hat Software Collections (RHSCL) 1.0, that contain Python 2.7 and Python
3.3, for almost a year now [1] - RHSCL is installable on RHEL 6; RHSCL 1.1
(also with 2.7 and 3.3) has been released few weeks ago and is supported on
RHEL 6 and 7. Also, these collections now have their community rebuilds at
[2], so you can just download them without needing to talk to Red Hat at
all. But yeah, these are all RPMs, so you have to be root to install them.

Indeed, while there are still some rough edges, software collections look
like the best approach to doing maintainable system installs of Python
runtimes other than the system Python into Fedora/RHEL/CentOS et al (and I
say that while wearing both my upstream and downstream hats).

Collections solve this problem in a general (rather than CPython specific)
way, since they can be used to get upgraded versions of language runtimes,
databases, web servers, etc, all without risking the stability of the OS
itself. I hope to see someone put together collections for PyPy and PyPy3
as well.

The approaches used for runtime isolation of software collections should
also be applicable to Debian systems, but (as far as I am aware) the
tooling to build them as debs rather than RPMs doesn't exist yet.

> Please don't take this as a criticism of your ideas, I see what you're
trying to solve. I just think the way you're trying to solve it is
unachievable or would consume so much community resources, that it would
end up unmaintained and buggy most of the time.

For prebuilt userland installs on Linux, I think "miniconda" is the current
best available approach. It has its challenges (especially around its
handling of security concerns), but it's designed to offer a full cross
platform package management system that makes it well suited to the task of
managing prebuilt language runtimes in user space.

Cheers,
Nick.

>
> --
> Regards,
> Bohuslav "Slavek" Kabrda.
>
> [1] http://developerblog.redhat.com/2013/09/12/rhscl1-ga/
> [2] https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/
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