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0 pointstmnvix1y ago0 comments

For the past 4-5 years this is what has worked exceptionally well for me:

- pyenv for installing multiple versions of python on my machine

- direnv for managing environments (env variables, python version, and virtual environment)

- pip for installing dependencies (pinning versions and only referencing primary packages in requirements.txt - none of their dependencies)

This makes everything extremely easy to work with. When I cd into a project directory direnv loads everything necessary for that environment.

Each project directory has a .env and a .envrc file. The .envrc looks something like this:

    layout python ~/.pyenv/versions/3.11.0/bin/python3
    dotenv .env

Absolutely no headaches working on dozens of local python projects.

0 comments

KronisLV1y ago

> Absolutely no headaches working on dozens of local python projects.

The other day, I moved over to a new container base image that's supposed to run Ansible inside of it. Almost immediately, when trying to manage a RHEL8 compatible host, I got this error: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/82068

I've had issues not only with Python projects that I write, but also with software that's relying on it. Then again, while there are both problems and ways around those, my experience has been similar with pretty much every tech stack out there: from Java apps that refuse to run on anything newer than JDK 8 (good luck updating dozens of Spring dependencies across approx. half a million lines of code in a codebase that's like a decade old), to hopelessly outdated PHP versions or software that works on ancient Yarn versions but not on newer ones and doesn't even build correctly when you move over to Node with npm or software that's stuck on old Gulp versions. Same for Ruby and Rails versions that will run, or .NET and ASP.NET codebases, where the framework code ends up being tightly coupled to the business logic, don't even get me started on front ends that rely on Angular (or AngularJS), Vue (2 to 3 migrations) or React. I've had Debian updates break GRUB, AMD video drivers for the iGPU on the 200GE preventing it from booting, differences between Oracle JDK and OpenJDK having a 10x impact on performance, Nextcloud updates corrupting the install, the same happening with GitLab installs, just a day ago I had a PostgreSQL instance refuse to start up with: PANIC: could not locate a valid checkpoint record. PostgreSQL, of all software.

Sometimes churn feels unavoidable if you don't want code to rot and basically everything is brittle. All software kind of sucks, sometimes certain qualities just suck a bit more than the average. Containers and various version management tools make it suck a bit less, though!

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