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.
I like to use pythonz in this case; it’s a tool to manage Python installs, and it puts the installs in a directory under your home directory, not affecting anything in the system.
It does build each version from source, which introduces some quirks; I’ve found compilation for some Python versions works better with clang, and sometimes, you need to enable build options.
Still, I think this is a good way to do things; just start whichever Python version you want, and then create a venv with it.