On 2021-05-17 07:10:39 +0100 (+0100), Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > (apologies i forgot to say, please do cc me [...] Done. > a dist-upgrade to debian / testing - a way to obtain the latest > variants of critical software - frequently resulted in massive > breakage. > > i quickly learned never to attempt that again given the massive > disruption it caused to me being able to earn money as a software > engineer. [...] You're probably just going to see this as further confirmation of your opinion, or yet another person telling you that you're doing it wrong, but as someone who also writes rather a lot of Python programs for a living I learned long ago to not develop against the "system" on any platform. I use sid/unstable for my development systems, but I consider the python3 package in it to have two uses: Testing new packages of software which are targeting a future Debian stable release, and running other packaged things which are already part of Debian. For software development work, I compile my own Python interpreters and libraries, because I need to develop against a variety of different versions of these, sometimes in chroots, to be able to target other distros and releases thereof. I keep all these in my homedir or otherwise outside of normal system-wide installation paths. Bear in mind that this isn't just a Debian problem, for decades Red Hat has also advised programmers not to rely on their /usr/bin/python for custom development because it is patched and tuned specifically for running system applications packaged for their distro and not intended as a general-purpose Python distribution. -- Jeremy Stanley
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