Today I had to downgrade fastapi from 0.114.0 to 0.112.4 to make a software work. And it just hit me - what if pip didn’t support 0.112.4 anymore? We would lose a good piece of software just because of that.

Of course, we can “freeze” the packages into an executable that will run for as long as the OS supports it. Which is a lot longer. But the executable is closed source. We can’t see the code that is run from an executable.

Therefore, there is a need for an alternative to which we still have access to the packages even after the program is built. That would make it safely unnecessary for pip to store all versions of all packages forever more.

Any ideas?

  • obbeel@lemmy.eco.brOP
    11·
    4 months ago

    If prior versions were not support by pip anymore, so yes, if it were removed. There are cases of packages not being supported by the platforms, aren’t there? I’ve run into cases where the package was fully deprecated and not useable or downloadable anymore.

    • remram@lemmy.ml
      1·
      4 months ago

      What do you mean “not supported by the platforms”? And do you mean that or “removed”?

      • obbeel@lemmy.eco.brOP
        11·
        4 months ago

        I couldn’t download it even if I wanted to. That’s what I mean. It returns a message saying it isn’t supported.

        • remram@lemmy.ml
          2·
          4 months ago

          “It” being the PyPI server not finding it? Pip not supporting the API? Or it downloads correctly but the setup.py prints that error?

          • obbeel@lemmy.eco.brOP
            11·
            3 months ago

            I think it said it’s deprecated or something? I’m not sure, I just know I had problems downloading packages before.

            I don’t think it was setup.py . I think I tried to download it directly through pip install xx==0.4.0 or something (the version was required by the program) and it said the package doesn’t exist.