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jjgreen • last Sunday at 12:21 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

I've been on Debian forever and love it to bits. But in an act which can only be described as batshit insanity, they have chosen to patch Python's pip3 in a manner which breaks the --prefix option. On Debian

  pip3 install <whatever> --prefix=/usr/local
will install into /usr/local/local, so one has to use the prefix /usr. The same command on, say, OpenSuSE will install into /usr and break your system. Barking mad.

https://sources.debian.org/src/python3.7/3.7.3-2+deb10u3/deb...

Replies

zahlman • last Sunday at 2:49 PM

> python3.7

Certainly a terrible UX, but the motivation is clear: they're trying to get PEP 668 protections for older versions.

Virtual environments work a lot better anyway, honestly. (With a properly crafted `pyvenv.cfg`, it should be possible to convince Python that your /usr/local is a virtual environment, but I can't be sure offhand if there are any serious negative consequences of that.)

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