Discussing a breaking change in Python’s setuptools.
The really interesting part is in the discussion section… and it shows once more how incredibly well-designed the GNU Guix package manager is – which solves these problems very very well, for arbitrary languages and with a fast growing distribution of, by now, about 50,000 packages.
Guix is really making fantastic progress and is a good alternative in the space between stable and fully FOSS distributions, likes Debian, and distributions which are more up-to-date, like Arch.
And one interesting thing is that the number of packages is now so large that one can frequently install additional more recent packages on a Debian systems, or ones that are not packaged by Debian.
For example, I run Debian stable as base system, Guix as extra package manager (and Arch in a VM for trying out latest software for programming).
The thing is now Guix often provides more recent packages tham Debian, like many Rust command line tools, where Debian is lagging a bit. There are many interesting ones, and most are recent because Rust is progressing so fast. Using Guix, I can install them without using the language package manager, regardless whether iy is written in Rust, Go, or Python 3.13.
Or, today I read an article about improvements in spaced repetition learning algorithms. It mentioned that the FLOSS software Anki provided it, and I became curious and wanted to have a look at Anki. Well, Debian has no “anki” package - and it is written, among other languages, im Python and Rust, so good luck getting it on Debian stable. But for Guix, I only had to do “guix install anki” and had it installed.
This works a tad slower than apt-get … but it still saves time compared to installing stuff and dependencies manually.