On Wed, 11 Nov 2020 at 14:26:55 +0100, Matthias Klose wrote: > If you ask some upstreams of Python based software, their recommendation would > be to use pip, and probably conda (a cross OS distribution focusing on Python) > to do upstream development. If you ask casual users, you probably will get > another answer. > > Same thing probably for Java libraries. I don't know anybody who would do > development using the Debian packaged libraries.
I think perhaps the key thing here is that Python does *have* a reasonably well-defined system-wide search path for packages outside the Python core (/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages). Even if some projects prefer to use pip instead of dist-packages, they can't claim that dist-packages doesn't exist. Also analogous: just because some people use LD_LIBRARY_PATH-based mechanisms like jhbuild or the Steam Runtime for their C/C++ libraries, that doesn't invalidate the fact that the C compiler and runtime linker are designed to have default search paths that contain more than just libgcc and glibc, and can have (for example) a system copy of a third-party library like zlib or GTK. My understanding is that Rust and Go code literally doesn't have analogous built-in system-wide search paths for third-party libraries, and when building Debian packages that contain Rust and Go code, we have to invent them in a Debian-specific way. smcv