[Python-ideas] High time for a builtin function to manage packages (simply)?

Andrew Barnert abarnert at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 10 07:15:16 CEST 2015


On Sep 9, 2015, at 20:32, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> 
> Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas writes:
> 
>> If StackOverflow/SU/TD questions are any indication, a
>> disproportionate number of these people are Mac users using Python
>> 2.7, who have installed a second Python 2.7 (or, in some cases, two
>> of them) alongside Apple's.
> 
> Often enough it's the other way around: the distro catches up to the
> user as they upgrade.  I didn't even realize "10.10 Yosemite" had 2.7,
> this box has been upgraded from "10.7 Lion" or so,

No, that's not the problem. Lion came with 2.7.1, so you already had it before upgrading it, and it's hard to imagine Apple upgrading your system 2.7.1 to 2.7.6 or 2.7.10 broke anything. More likely, Apple screwed up your PATH, or broke your MacPorts so you had to reinstall or repair it?

> and I just use
> MacPorts 2.7 all the time.  I haven't worried about what Apple
> supplies as /usr/bin/python in 6 or 7 years.

I'd assume most people on this list know what they're doing with their PATH. If you don't, then you just got lucky for a few years.

Well, not just lucky--MacPorts does go out of its way to make things easier for you in various ways (hammering home keeping /opt/local/bin at the the start of your PATH, trying to adjust the PATH system-wide and for LaunchServices as well as shells, providing many packages as ports so you don't need pip, offering a python-select tool that autodetects Apple and PSF Pythons and tries to make them play nice with MacPorts Pythons, etc.). So MacPorts users don't see such problems nearly as often as Homebrew (or Fink or Gentoo Prefix, if anyone still uses those), PSF installers, and third-party extra-batteries installers. But they still can come up--and if you didn't even realize you were running multiple Python 2.7 versions in parallel, that just means you never tried anything that MacPorts didn't anticipate. And, of course, most people with two Python 2.7s on Mac are not using MacPorts anyway.


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