Installation hell

[Thomas Passin]

On 12/19/2022 9:59 AM, Weatherby,Gerard wrote:
> Personally, I don’t use Windows and avoid it like the plague.  Python is easy to install on Linux and Mac.

That's not been my experience.  Windows installers for Python have 
worked well for me over many generations of Python releases.  It's Linux 
where I've found difficulties.  For example, if your distro's Python 
install didn't include tkinter (or even pip), how do you get it?  It's 
different for different Linux distros.  I generally have to use internet 
searches to find out.

For another example, when you use pip to install a package, it sometimes 
suggests that you install a newer version of pip itself. Should you do 
that?  On Linux, probably not, because the distro will have modified pip 
so it puts things in distro-specific places. Yet there is no newer 
version of pip available through the distro's package manager.  Will 
anything bad happen if you don't update pip?  Who knows?

I have a Linux VM that has several versions of Python3 on it.  Python3.8 
came installed with the distro, but for some programs I need Python 
3.9+.  If I forget which versions I have, how can I find out?  People 
say to use which, but that doesn't work - it only reports "python3". 
This does work, but it's not all that easy to remember (the grep "site" 
part is just to filter out uninformative result lines):

~$ find 2>/dev/null ~ -name python -type d |grep "site"
/home/tom/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/PyQt5/Qt5/qsci/api/python
/home/tom/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/pandas/_libs/src/ujson/python
/home/tom/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/PyQt5/Qt5/qsci/api/python

Not that this task is much easier to remember on Windows, but it's not 
harder.  One way: the "py" launcher will tell you:

py --list
-V:3.10 *        Python 3.10 (64-bit)
-V:3.9           Python 3.9 (64-bit)
-V:3.7           Python 3.7 (64-bit)
-V:2.7

This is not Linux-bashing, but there's no need for Windows-bashing either.

> I’d start here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/python/overview-of-python-tools-for-visual-studio?view=vs-2022
> 
> From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+gweatherby=uchc.edu at python.org> on behalf of Jim Lewis <jimdaniellewis at gmail.com>
> Date: Sunday, December 18, 2022 at 12:56 PM
> To: Python-list at python.org <Python-list at python.org>
> Subject: Fwd: Installation hell
> *** Attention: This is an external email. Use caution responding, opening attachments or clicking on links. ***
> 
> I'm an occasional user of Python and have a degree in computer science.
> Almost every freaking time I use Python, I go through PSH (Python Setup
> Hell). Sometimes a wrong version is installed. Sometimes it's a path issue.
> Or exe naming confusion: python, python3, phthon311, etc. Or library
> compatibility issues - took an hour to find out that pygame does not work
> with the current version of python. Then the kludgy PIP app and using a DOS
> box under Windows with command prompts which is ridiculous. God only knows
> how many novice users of the language (or even intermediate users) were
> lost in the setup process. Why not clean the infrastructure up and make a
> modern environment or IDE or something better than it is now. Or at least
> good error messages that explain exactly what to do. Even getting this
> email to the list took numerous steps.
> 
> -- A frustrated user
> --
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