Re: [PLUG] Fixing a Python library mismatch

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Sat, May 16, 2020 at 8:59 AM Walt Mankowski via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, May 16, 2020 at 07:59:47AM -0400, Walt Mankowski via plug wrote:
> > Noted, but this seems like the sort of thing that is likely to happen
> > again and I'd like to know how to properly fix it.
> >
> > The reason I suspect pip is that then I install big packages in Perl
> > it takes several minutes to compile the code and run all the
> > tests. But when I install packages with pip they all install in a few
> > seconds. This leads me to believe it's downloading a pre-compiled
> > version of numpy.
>
> I figured out what the problem was, and it wasn't pip at all. The
> problem was that I'd built python with the old version of libffi. I
> rebuilt python and now it works again!
>

I'll just note that if somebody is routinely wanting to micromanage
the combination of dependency versions present on their system, Gentoo
is actually fairly well-suited to that niche.  Obviously that has its
pros and cons, but you can mix and match stable and bleeding-edge
packages and when things need to be rebuilt Gentoo will typically
rebuild them automatically.  For most packages you can build support
for whatever python versions you wish in parallel.

It should be noted that some programming languages/environments are
better supported than others.  You only get this functionality if you
actually build from packages, so if a particular language of interest
isn't well-maintained on Gentoo it might not be as useful, though if
it isn't too complex you could always just maintain your own packages
(often updating a package involves nothing more than copying its file
and changing the version number in the filename, though this is not
always the case).  And, of course, you're still limited to whatever
compatibility issues are imposed by upstream.

-- 
Rich
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