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The distro model did not work, which is why the other model took over.

I used to try to religiously follow the recommendation only to install Python packages which had been repackaged by Debian. Fine, but it meant that you couldn't use any even slightly obscure package, nor one that was younger than some timelag, which ranged from a few months to a couple of years.

Inevitably, you want to pip install something. Then the repercussions of mixing Debian packages and pip packages are a whole new set of problems. And you can't get anyone to look at your problem, even if it's a common issue which the Debian packager could fix or workaround, because 'pip is not supported, you should install this via `apt install python-foo`'.

The best solution is and was to only use pip packages, along with some form of isolation from the wider system, whether virtual environments, containers or what. Python now has extremely good native tools to work this way, and so do most modern languages. I only work like this now, and so, it appears, do all the maintainers of my dependencies and my transitive dependencies. Development cycles are much faster, and it all just works.



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