I wanted to start contributing to an open source software project yesterday evening, and they recommend virtual box to not mess with your default installation of the program and the databases it uses.

So I thought Debian would be a nice clean distro for developing Python… Gnome feels really unusual to me and I hate it, I guess I can replace it with KDE.

But I couldn’t install a specific Python version? System python is 3.13 but I needed 3.10. I tried adding the deadsnake ppa but Debian didn’t know the add-apt-repository command. So I tried to install software-properties-common which also failed because the package couldn’t be located. Someone on SO said it was removed because security but I mean wtf? So the solution is to add this package cgabbelt manually to sources.list but I couldn’t get it to run because I couldn’t verify the GPG key… Then I went to sleep.

I am pretty sure this community can help with the problem, but honestly, wtf? I am not a Linux power user but a data scientist who works on Linux for a couple of years now, how is it possible installing a specific Python version is such a hassle?

Is Debian just a poor choice for developing? The software I want to contribute to has many dependencies, they recommend Ubuntu but fuck Ubuntu. So I guess I can’t take something too exotic.

  • prettybunnys@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    10 hours ago

    Python is a clusterfuck because so many operating systems rely on it generally, so they may require a version minimum.

    Which version of Debian are you trying to do this with and what version of python?

    I have a repo (why-py3) where I’ve cobtainerized python of various versions with various versions of Debian for “questionable reasons”

    Debian is a great choice for developing, it’s rock solid and stable BUT if you want to be working with bleeding edge packages you may need to use the rolling release Debian which is less stable.

    Or fedora might be more your speed as it has newer packages typically.

      • prettybunnys@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        8 hours ago

        I’m not talking about removing the system python but rather compiling everything necessary to build a package for differing versions / distros then executing that version and some tools linking that version. It’s dumb, but I needed it when I needed it.

        My use case is/was extremely NICHE but I may be able to provide some help if they really need to go this route.