PythonPath / sys.path

[Thomas Passin]

On 5/14/2023 11:08 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Mon, 15 May 2023 at 12:07, Thomas Passin <list1 at tompassin.net> wrote:
>> Well, no, why would you assume that?  I started to use Linux - in VMs -
>> because I had to make sure that my cross-platform java/jython Tomcat
>> program would work right on Linux.  Why, for example, would I think to
>> install Idle from the package manager when it, or things like that, were
>> always in my experience installed with pip? For that matter, "sudo
>> apt-get install pip" won't install pip.  You need to use a different
>> name, and it may or may not be different for different distros.
> 
> If you EVER had to install something other than a Python package, you
> would have had to make use of the system package manager. You're
> right, there are multiple obvious ways to install Idle, but that
> doesn't mean that the package manager isn't one of them.

Yes, after a while I came to realize that missing Python pieces might be 
available from the package manager.  That doesn't mean it's obvious, or 
easy to discover just what names to use.  And sometimes one has to add a 
new external repository.  Personally, I don't find it easy to scroll 
through hundreds of lines in the synaptics search results looking for 
something whose name I can only partly guess at.  If I know the command 
line equivalent for a search, I could do a grep and that would probably 
be more focused.  But trying to work with a dozen different distros 
because various clients might use them - it's hard to keep details straight.

Anyway, there's no point in trying to convince me that I could have 
understood everything at the start that I may have learned later.  I'm 
just interested in passing on things I've learned along that way that a 
newcomer to Python in Linux may not realize.