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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

Well pip install library needs root, which you probably don't have. So now you have to teach them about making, and acitvating, virtual environments.

Also, they can't easily search through the packages in a nice GUI and just click on the one they want to install.

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>pip install library needs root

Hmm, not really. It's actually advised against [1].

[1] - https://askubuntu.com/questions/802544/is-sudo-pip-install-s...

Pip install needs root on my ubuntu install, my lab's and university's old redhat servers and my windows for linux install. I've had to install anaconda python to get any real work done on all three systems. Anaconda works fine for me but I've not even had to think about anything to install packages in R.

try

    pip install --user

or virtualenvs

Ubuntu doesn't ship with pip or virtualenv. In fact it ships with a version of Python where the built-in equivalent to virtualenv, pyvenv, is explicitly disabled.

So you have to install extra Python packages, as root. You have to have that Python experience that guides you to install as few of them as you can, just enough so you can get started with a virtualenv, so you don't end up relying on your system Python environment.

And this is really hard to explain to people who aren't deeply familiar with Python. "Never use sudo to install Python packages! Oh, you got errors. We obviously meant use sudo for two particular packages and never again after that."

In the terrible case where you don't have root, you have to ignore Ubuntu's version of Python and compile it yourself from scratch. Hope the right development libraries are installed!

Maybe I'm wrong and there's a method I've overlooked. If there is: please show me how to install a Python package on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 16.04, without ever using sudo, and I will happily spread the good news.

That sounds like a major problem with Ubuntu, rather than with Python or pip.

On Windows, meanwhile, the standard Python installer gets all this set up properly in like three clicks. Better yet, because it installs per-user by default, "pip install" just works. And if you still choose to install it globally, it will fail, but it will tell you exactly what you need to do to make it work:

    Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [WinError 5] Access is denied: ...
    Consider using the `--user` option or check the permissions.

One can't help but wonder how we ended up in a situation where the most popular Linux distro somehow does Python worse than Windows.

Eh, that has always been the case for windows vs linux, that you don't have to compile anything yourself because there is always an installer that will deploy precompiled binaries for whatever you want to install (except for when there isn't, because nobody has compiled it for windows, at which point you're in deeper shit) (or except when something installs itself but doesn't update your envars, so you have to do it yourself, which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole "installer" thing).

You don't need to compile anything yourself on Linux either - that's what package managers are for.

Iiish. For small projects or when you want to get development versions etc that are not in a distro's repos it's pretty common to have to do a make-configure.

Then again, with Python in particular, I have often had errors either with pip-install, or after "successful" installation, for various reasons.

In this case, we were talking about Python itself. I don't see any particular reason why most people should need to build it themselves, whether on Windows or on Linux. Packages are another matter, but here the issue is the way Python itself is packaged on Ubuntu.

Don't despair, in the Anaconda installed with visual studio (now a default) you can't update or install packages without being admin! And if you install Anaconda again it merges the start menu entries and you can't tell which is which...

This is not really thinking though, just a ~3 hour commitment once to figure out how it is supposed to work.

Makes it fun when running on a VM in the cloud which only has a root user. Docker becomes almost essential to preventing errant Python scripts fudging up the system.

Not on a personal computer, no, but the vast majority of managed systems won't let you install anything outside of your home directory. Of course you could install using `pip install --user` but you will inevitably run into problems when something you install locally needs an updated version of something installed on the system.

This is bad advice. Pip should be used in virtual environments, and not to install system packages

While you're right that it's bad advice, it also highlights the problem with pip that these less experienced people have. The ideal way to deal with Python packages is virtualenvs, but setting up a virtualenv, and then activating it every time you want to use it (or setting up tools to do it for you) is an incredibly huge headache for less experienced people to deal with. R doesn't require that whatsoever.

Neither language requires an isolated dev environment, but it can help with avoiding headaches. As python has things like virtualenv and buildout, fortunately R has 'packrat' available, which provides a similar isolated/reproducible dev environment solution.

https://rstudio.github.io/packrat/

There's nothing wrong with pip for installing per-user packages outside of virtual environments.

And pip s upgrade process for packages is almost non existent, while R supports that very, very easily.

Never had any trouble with `pip install --upgrade library`.

Not sure if there's support for upgrading all packages at once, though.

There is no such support for multiple packages at once. R can do it though.

You can certainly update multiple packages at once using pip. Just use a requirements.txt file, which you should be doing anyway if you're using multiple packages (or just want to be able to reproduce your environment).

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