I was just setting up a new Mac the other day, only to be surprised that this is _still_ an issue. All I had was XCode and Homebrew - everything fell apart when I tried to install ansible.

Throwback to the time when I accidentally did a `sudo apt remove python` in hopes of cleaning the python mess in my PC and broke my LM installation.

Apt has the big brained move of uninstalling half your system if you try to reinstall a core dependency instead of just setting the dependant packages as disabled while it's missing or something, ffs.

I don't think it's possible if you use a global environment for everything, as different packages might have conflicting dependencies. The best way to solve it is to separate environments. I personally prefer conda as it's fairly easy to create environments of any python version.

There’s no solution. You gotta have a separate environment (e.g. a docker container) for each project. Each env has its own python version and requirements.txt

Not practical when you need something like ROS with rospy that needs to be global.

Python is putting its fingers in its ears singing "LALALALA USE A VENV" instead of fixing the damn ecosystem. Node and npm proved that a solution exists and it's doable.

There's a PEP for adding support for a __pythonpackages__ directory, similar to node_modules.

https://peps.python.org/pep-0582/

Unfortunately the PEP is from 2018 and is still being discussed. The last post in the comment thread is from February.

https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-582-python-local-packages-d...

That's unfortunate; until I went looking for citations I thought it was further along and actually scheduled for the next Python release.

Looks like there is a pip-alternative that implements the PEP, but I haven't played around with it yet.

https://pdm.fming.dev/

Poetry is almost that. It also takes 99% of the trouble of solving dependencies in pip files

(though the usual way it breaks is your python interpreter gets updated and the venv becomes useless)

This sounds interesting. I'll check it out, thanks :)