"Don't install on the system Python"

[Michael Torrie]

On 11/30/19 9:42 PM, John Ladasky wrote:
> Can anyone provide concrete examples of problems arising from
> installing modules on top of the system Python?  Am I courting
> disaster?

No you aren't.  I've also never had any problems. I've installed many
things into my root system Python installation with pip including PyQt5.
 It's just easier for me to have them in the system installation.  I'm
on a CentOS 7 box, which depends on Python 2 for a lot of system
functions. I've moved to Python 3 now, so I mess with the system Python
less and less.  I understand that I probably should be using a
virtualenv and pip installing into that, but I'm just too lazy.

A couple of years ago I even managed to upgrade the system Python from
2.6 to 2.7 without any issues. I ended up making an RPM that neatly
upgraded the system one.  I also have upgraded the gtk2 bindings and the
GTK2 library itself (again building RPMs), and everything worked fine,
even the graphical centos utilities.

The only problems I've ever heard of come from trying to manually remove
stuff from Python that the system depended on.  I've never heard of any
problems installing additional modules.  90% of the time the module you
need will be in the repositories, so no worries there at all. And not
much to worry about for the rest.