Martijn Faassen: The Call of Python 2.8

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> I'm actually asking a serious question. How does a distro "actively hide"
> something publicly available on the Internet? Note that, on Linux (when
> you talk about "distributions", you probably don't mean OS X or Windows)
> all the compiler tools needed to install from source are readily
> available, so anyone who wants to install a Python version not supported
> by their distro can do so. Many people don't wish to install anything
> outside of their distro's supported packages, but that's their choice,
> not the distro imposing anything on them.

I'd say it's not so much "actively hide" as just "abandon people to
their own devices". It's all very well to say "well hey, just go and
compile it from source"; this assumes two things:

1) The available source code will compile on your platform
2) The user knows how to compile code.

The first is true of the platforms supported by python.org, but that's
not the OS/distribution helping you to get Python - that's Python
helping you to get Python. The second... that's where things like
"apt-get build-dep" come in, but mainly there's a general
understanding among end users that compiling code is haaaaaaard. Some
cultures have this more strongly than others... sometimes for good
reason. (I had stupid amounts of trouble trying to get a C compiler
going on OS X. A non-programmer, doing the same job, might well give
up, and I wouldn't argue.) Compiling from source without a package
manager fetching all the appropriate libraries means an iterative
process of "compile or build, see what the error is, figure out what's
missing, fetch it, GOTO 10". For me, that's life; that's something
I've done on a number of different systems, and I know lots of the
clues and/or the tools for figuring things out. For many
non-programmers, though, if there's no binary package, they won't use
the software.

ChrisA