Python and IDEs

[Steven D'Aprano]

Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:
> 
>> On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 9:10 PM, Wolfgang Keller <feliphil at gmx.net> wrote:
>>> Because on such operating systems, each and every application is an
>>> entirely self-contained package that doesn't need any "packages" or
>>> "installers" to use it.
>>
>> You mean everyone has to reinvent the proverbial wheel AND worry about
>> dependency collisions? Yeah, that's a heavenly thought.
> 
> I'm guessing he's referring to the modern fad of application sandboxing.
> Each application is installed with everything it needs on top of the
> basic OS.
>
> If you have ten Python apps, you'll have ten Python installations. 

A horrible thought. Hard drives are cheap, but not that cheap that one can
trivially afford to turn every 1K Python script into a 25,000K install
(based on the size of the Windows binary-only installer). On my system, the
obvious application directories (I may have missed some) total 460MB:

[steve at ando ~]$ du -hc /bin/ /sbin/ /usr/bin/ /usr/local/bin/
7.9M    /bin/
38M     /sbin/
76K     /usr/bin/mergetools
380M    /usr/bin/
35M     /usr/local/bin/
460M    total

If those apps were an average of 10,000 times larger, that makes 4.6TB,
significantly larger than an entry level 1TB hard drive. It also makes
rescue DVDs and boot USB sticks impractical, to say nothing of the expense
of downloading upgrades. I can download (say) an entire Linux Mint system
in an hour or three, which is significantly better than the two years it
would take to download if everything was 10,000 times bigger.

But even more problematic... if there's a security vulnerability in Python,
would you rather wait for the vulnerability to patched once in a central
Python binary, or individually in each and every single Python script that
comes with a bundled Python binary?


> Also 
> the applications have no way to communicate outside their respective
> sandboxes. They can't access each others' files, for example.

If two applications can both write to the file system, they can communicate.
If they have sufficient file system privileges, they can even reach into
each other's bundle and modify anything they want.


> Personally, I tend to stick to this package management strategy: install
> whatever is available with yum and write the rest yourself.

+0.8 on that. Sometimes I install software outside of the package management
system, but I always feel a tad dirty when I do so :-)



-- 
Steven