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From: Thomas Passin <list1@tompassin.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: Strategies for avoiding having to use --break-system-packages
 with pip
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2025 11:36:34 -0500
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On 1/14/2025 6:32 AM, Chris Green via Python-list wrote:
> I have a (relatively) clean Debian 12 installation running on my two
> workhorse systems, a desktop server at home and my laptop that travels
> around with me.
> 
> I moved from Xubuntu to Debian on both these systems a few months ago.
> 
> I ran Xubuntu for many years and acquired a whole lot of python
> packages installed with pip, as root.  For the last couple of years I
> had to use the --break-system-packages option to get things installed.
> 
> As far as I'm aware I never hit any dependency problems doing this.
> It's probably because things I installed with pip were mostly quite
> small, specialised, packages that I used in just one or two utility
> programs that I had written myself.  In quite a few cases these were
> realated to image processing and such things.
> 
> 
> So far I've managed to keep my Debian 12 installations 'pip free', I
> haven't even got pip installed.  However I may have just come across
> something that would at least be very useful and it comes from PyPi.
> (It's tkintertable if that's of any interest or relevance)
> 
> 
> What are my options?
>     
>      Just install it using pip as root and --break-system-packages,
>      what's likely to break?

You can also install with --user and --break-system-packages, but that 
doesn't really solve the problem.  Also, as just happened to me, if an 
upgrade happens to change the system's python to a newer version (e.g., 
3.12.x to 3.13.y), you would have to install all your packages again 
with the new Python install.

>      Use a virtual environment, what do I have to do then to make using
>      my program (that uses tkintertable) 'transparent', i.e. I just
>      want to be able to run the program from the command prompt like
>      any other program.

You can write a shell script that activates the venv and then launches 
your program.  This works pretty well.

>      Download tkintertable from git into my development environment and
>      use that.  My PYTHONPATH will need to point to it but I can't see
>      any further issues with doing this.

This is an approach I use sometimes, mainly if I have cloned a project. 
I run the project's program(s) using a script that sets the PYTHONPATH.

>      Anything else?  As far as I can see using pipx doesn't help me at
>      all (see recent thread here).

To completely avoid problems when the system's Python install gets 
changed, you can install your own Python version outside of the package 
manager; it doesn't have to be the same version as the system's.  I've 
done this when I wanted to run a later version of Python than the 
system's. You would have to take care of updating it yourself since the 
package manager won't know about it. On the system where I did this, I 
ran the system's python version using "python3" and my own using 
"python3.11" (I think the system was still on 3.8 or 3.9).