Re: [IBMiOSS] Python, ACS, Open Source and MKDocs

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 3:22 PM Mark Waterbury
<mark.s.waterbury@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So you can quickly end up installing one OSS package, then at some other time, you try to install a different OSS package, and now either it refuses to install, saying there is a conflict, or even worse, the first one quits working because you inadvertently updated something that it "depends on."

My recommendation for how to avoid this is to use a separate sub-directory for each "set" of related OSS tools, and install all the needed stuff into there ... then you can just zip it all up, (or in Unix terms, create one big "tarball"), and if you need to install it on another system, just unzip or untar it all again. In other words, each product or tool has its own "top-level" directory that contains ALL of the "dependencies" needed for that tool. So, it is "self-contained." (Sure, it uses more disk space, but it solves a lot of problems and saves a lot of frustration, long term.)

That is the venv concept precisely. In the case of Python, pip and
venv complement each other. venv makes it easy to create and select
among these isolated subdirectories; pip makes it easy to install
packages into the currently active venv.

And naturally, there are efforts to make things even easier still. The
two leading projects in the "pip-and-venv-superset" space are probably
Pipenv and Poetry. (I believe Kevin is trying to move in the direction
of using Poetry for IBM's Python projects.)

John Y.