"Svetlana Tkachenko" <[email protected]> writes: > Hello, > >> Now, my question is why is it that one would not be able to adopt some >> system convention allowing various versions of the same package to be >> installed side by side, > > I think nixos and guix allow this. > > Sveta
There is also the somewhat older approach of so-called 'environment modules', which is widely used on HPC clusters. The original version is written in Tcl (https://envmodules.io/), a more recent one, Lmod, is written in Lua (https://lmod.readthedocs.io). With this approach multiple versions of a piece of software can be installed side-by-side. So this is the list of versions of Python we currently have installed: $ module -r av ^Python/ ---------------------- /software/easybuild/modules/all ----------------------- Python/2.7.14-GCCcore-6.4.0-bare Python/3.7.2-GCCcore-8.2.0 Python/2.7.14-intel-2018a Python/3.7.4-GCCcore-8.3.0 Python/2.7.15-foss-2018b Python/3.8.2-GCCcore-9.3.0 Python/2.7.15-GCCcore-7.3.0-bare Python/3.8.6-GCCcore-10.2.0 Python/2.7.15-GCCcore-8.2.0 Python/3.9.5-GCCcore-10.3.0-bare Python/2.7.15-intel-2018b Python/3.9.5-GCCcore-10.3.0 Python/2.7.16-GCCcore-8.3.0 Python/3.9.6-GCCcore-11.2.0-bare Python/2.7.18-GCCcore-9.3.0 Python/3.9.6-GCCcore-11.2.0 Python/2.7.18-GCCcore-10.2.0 Python/3.10.4-GCCcore-11.3.0-bare Python/2.7.18-GCCcore-10.3.0-bare Python/3.10.4-GCCcore-11.3.0 Python/2.7.18-GCCcore-11.2.0-bare Python/3.10.8-GCCcore-12.2.0-bare Python/3.6.4-foss-2018a Python/3.10.8-GCCcore-12.2.0 Python/3.6.4-intel-2018a Python/3.11.3-GCCcore-12.3.0 Python/3.6.6-foss-2018b Python/3.11.5-GCCcore-13.2.0 Python/3.6.6-fosscuda-2018b Python/3.12.3-GCCcore-13.3.0 Python/3.6.6-intel-2018b Python/3.13.5-GCCcore-14.3.0 (D) Things can get a bit complicated, as one generally has to manage different versions of the dependencies, but there is also software for that, such as EasyBuild (https://easybuild.io/), which is primarily for actually building software, but does all the dependency management to and works with module environments. Cheers, Loris -- This signature is currently under constuction.
