Re: Python Tooling

On Mon, 31 Aug 2026 at 22:32, Tristan Partin <tristan(at)partin(dot)io> wrote:

> On Mon Aug 31, 2026 at 8:26 PM UTC, Jonathan S. Katz wrote:
> > On 8/31/26 4:23 PM, Tristan Partin wrote:
> >
> >>> The basic answer is, "use whatever is in debian" because that's what
> it's
> >>> deployed on, and at this point that's trixie.
> >>>
> >>> That also means we do *not* want to change the dependencies to anything
> >>> other than whatr's there.
> >>
> >> Does this mean that we rely on the versions of Python packages within
> >> Trixie and the requirements.txt is basically ignored?
> >
> > FWIW I will use requirements.txt in my local environment, but that only
> > happens when it gets nuked, so it's a once-every-few-years ordeal.
> >
> > (I could probably get the pgweb env to load from a container; perhaps
> > this is a suggestion towards a Dockerfile?)
>
> Are you referring to deploying as a container or a devcontainer? To
> expand on what I am thinking that we should use native Python tooling to
> manage dependencies. For instance, we would encode all our dependencies
> in the pyproject.toml, and then actually run the server with `uv run
> ...`.
>
> Python tooling moves so much faster than Debian that I don't think it
> makes sense to depend on Debian for anything other than the base OS and
> maybe the Python interpreter.
>

I think you're going to have a very steep uphill battle to fight to get
that done. Mainly because the vast majority of dependencies we have lack
the basic idea of a stable release/branch, LTS or whatever you want to call
it. Django itself does, which makes it work. But we don't have the
resources to go around and manually figure out which changes are needed to
which of our many apps whenever we're forced to upgrade something because
of a security update. For very little actual gain, since just sticking to
the supported versions has served us very well for many years.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: https://www.hagander.net/ <http://www.hagander.net/>
Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/ <http://www.redpill-linpro.com/>