(apologies i forgot to say, please do cc me, i am using the list
archives reply-to
links at https://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2021/05/msg00036.html)

Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org> wrote:

All the horrors that you are painting after this paragraph, are due to
the fact that you aren't doing "apt-get dist-upgrade". I'm having a hard
time understanding why you're both:
- not doing "apt-get dist-upgrade"

because precisely the difficulties encountered, and due to software development that critically requires more recent variants of what is typically in debian/stable
i.e. usually a minimum of one even three years out-of-date.

a dist-upgrade to debian / testing - a way to obtain the latest
variants of critical
software - frequently resulted in massive breakage.

i quickly learned never to attempt that again given the massive disruption
it caused to me being able to earn money as a software engineer.

- complaining that it's breaking your system

ah, you're missing the point by focussing on the background and context.
also, i didn't "complain" (despite it causing distress for some considerable number of years), i would have said, "i have a complaint" and stopped
at that, rather than moved on to describe the details of what the root cause is.

Could you care to explain? This makes absolutely no sense.

i could - but doing so is a distraction. i would prefer to solicit some responses that acknowledge that this is an actual problem that needs
solving.

Bryan's message unfortunately is a repeat of prior experiences
in reporting this issue over the years.

By the way, since you're never doing "apt-get dist-upgrade", it means
your system is full of security issues that aren't getting fixed.
Hopefully, the computer system(s) you're talking about isn't connected
to internet, right?

indeed. it's a development laptop on which i am critically reliant for financial income and for furthering free software.

Brian May wrote:

A rolling type update might be convenient, but it is not supported by
Debian, and has not been supported by Debian in sometime. There are complexities in such an arrangement, and it is difficult to test such arrangements will work as expected. Such an arrangement is not
guaranteed or tested to work.

Brian: as an experienced debian systems administrator and python
developer I'm not asking for help with either, and over the past 20 years
have successfully learned and deployed the techniques required to
keep a rolling system operational, in order to keep my business
operational and not lose money due to massive downtime either
from having to transfer 10 million source code files from laptop to
laptop, or from having to perform disaster recovery due to breakage.

like Thomas, you are missing the point by focussing on the context
and background material rather than focussing on the problem.

this was also the tack taken by others when i explained the problem:
"it's your own fault, this isn't supported, therefore we don't have to
do anything, therefore it's not a bug, therefore the bugreport is
summarily dismissed".

in my report, if you read it again carefully, i specifically stated that *multiple debian maintainers* are receiving *multiple complaints* of
breakage and disruption due to the standard debhelper-python
build system not following the "safe" practice outlined by
numpy and sci-py.

i can only surmise that they probably don't want to say anything
because the message being sent to them on summary closure
of bugreports is that, well, "nobody cares".

what i can say is that they're getting pretty fed up of constantly
having to close bugreports, every time someone raises this
issue, that's pretty clear from what they didn't say, if you know
what i mean.

once this is accepted as actually being a problem that needs solving,
rather than being avoided because "it's not supported, you're on your
own, not our problem", i am happy to help advise and discuss
solutions.

given that this has been ongoing for 10 years now i have been giving
it some thought for a long, long time.

however before getting to a discussion of solutions i would prefer
to see acknowledgement that it is recognised as a problem that
people actively wish to see fixed. otherwise i will have to wait patiently
for the next disaster situation to occur, or, sadly, after 20 years of
using debian, and remaining loyal to it despite maltreatment, i will
have to find an alternative distro.

what is stopping me from doing that is the severe financial consequences involved and risk to myself and my family due to my income being
far below average. the downtime that would result is a huge risk,
plus learning a new distro also compromises my effectiveness which
also results in further lost income.

what i am saying is: this is serious - i am effectlvely financially
trapped and critically dependent on the decisions that you make,
even though i am not paying you money for the work that you do.

l.

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On 2021-05-17 07:10:39 +0100 (+0100), Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

(apologies i forgot to say, please do cc me

[...]

Done.

a dist-upgrade to debian / testing - a way to obtain the latest
variants of critical software - frequently resulted in massive
breakage.

i quickly learned never to attempt that again given the massive
disruption it caused to me being able to earn money as a software
engineer.

[...]

You're probably just going to see this as further confirmation of
your opinion, or yet another person telling you that you're doing it
wrong, but as someone who also writes rather a lot of Python
programs for a living I learned long ago to not develop against the
"system" on any platform. I use sid/unstable for my development
systems, but I consider the python3 package in it to have two uses:
Testing new packages of software which are targeting a future Debian
stable release, and running other packaged things which are already
part of Debian.

For software development work, I compile my own Python interpreters
and libraries, because I need to develop against a variety of
different versions of these, sometimes in chroots, to be able to
target other distros and releases thereof. I keep all these in my
homedir or otherwise outside of normal system-wide installation
paths. Bear in mind that this isn't just a Debian problem, for
decades Red Hat has also advised programmers not to rely on their /usr/bin/python for custom development because it is patched and
tuned specifically for running system applications packaged for
their distro and not intended as a general-purpose Python
distribution.
--
Jeremy Stanley

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Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org> writes:

For software development work, I compile my own Python interpreters
and libraries, because I need to develop against a variety of
different versions of these, sometimes in chroots, to be able to
target other distros and releases thereof. I keep all these in my
homedir or otherwise outside of normal system-wide installation
paths. Bear in mind that this isn't just a Debian problem, for
decades Red Hat has also advised programmers not to rely on their /usr/bin/python for custom development because it is patched and
tuned specifically for running system applications packaged for
their distro and not intended as a general-purpose Python
distribution.

There are tools that will help you do this. e.g. pyenv, asdf, etc.

But, yes, for my own software development, I gave up trying to use
Debian python packages years ago, because I found I was spending way
more time trying to package the required dependencies (and dependencies
of dependencies of dependencies) then I spending developing my
application. This gets even worse if you want to support rpm based distributions. Plus the fact that I was becoming increasingly concerned
that if I upgraded library python3-L for application A, I might
accidentally break applications B, C, and D also, and testing/fixing
everything at the same time not really feasible. So now I use asdf + poetry/virtualenvs now, plus Docker for distribution.

As a result, I can upgrade the dependencies in each application one
application at a time. If an application breaks, I just need to fix that
one application, without breaking everything else at the same time. I
can upgrade the OS distribution, and not be concerned (mostly anyway)
that it will break my applications in weird and wonderful ways that I
could not predict.

This isn't so useful for distribution of Python based desktop
applications, but I don't do a lot of that (and probably would be
looking for a good off-the-shelf solution if I did).
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>

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