safety of (Py)Qt vs wx(Python)

Eli Schwartz eschwartz at archlinux.org
Wed Jun 10 19:59:54 BST 2020


On 6/10/20 2:01 PM, Grzegorz Bokota wrote:
> If you write an application for many users you need to asume that user may
> have different system versions and even may not have administrative
> privileges on their machine.

The solution to this is to ensure that your application is *more*
compatible, not *less* compatible. Make sure it works with whatever is
the default python3 on the operating systems you support.

> There are still things that are forced to say on older systems. For example
> if you would like to have a stable CUDA environment on Ubuntu it should be
> LTS, and on the nvidia page you can download only drivers for 16.04 and
> 18.04.
> There are also other "professional" programs that are only supported on
> Ubuntu LTS, Centos.
> 
> On the other hand there is no problem to install a modern python version on
> such an old system to use its full features and write simpler code.

Literally the entire point of these distros is to be stable, how is it
"stable" to install random "modern" python versions and use bleeding
edge features?

If someone wants to install newer python versions, no one is saying
they're not allowed -- but it doesn't matter, you still need to support
their use of old, stable python releases that come with the distro.

Therefore, it does not matter if your dev machine has access to modern
python, you don't have the option to "use its full features and write
simpler code" if you want to support stable users, as you'll alienate
all your stable users who cannot run the code anymore.

> And I do not think that ubuntu 18.04 or centos 8 are old systems.

That's not "Ubuntu LTS". It is one of a whole bunch of Ubuntu LTS
releases. There's a Ubuntu 2020 release that was first launched 50 days
ago. There's also a Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS which was released 6 years ago
and will not be End of Life for another 2 years. When I see people
talking about how they need Ubuntu LTS support, it nearly always means
either 14.04 or, if we're truly blessed by downright *visionaries*, the
shockingly recent 16.04, which are both supremely old.

CentOS 8 is less than a year old, anyone who is using CentOS because of
how stable it is is going to be using CentOS 7, which is more 2014 code,
this time supported until End of Life in 2024-06-30 and with full
updates for another 2 months still. The first newly deployed boxes will
only just start being deployed with CentOS 8.

All these are pretty old, and quite frankly, they will want to use old,
tested versions of python3 and wxpython, and their stable distro can
provide this just fine.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Arch Linux Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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