And if every Python developer, researcher using Python, etc, did that, it would be much less of a problem. The reality is, many, many don't.
It's kind of ironic, really. With the Zen of Python stating "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it" why is it that it's so common for people to not do the thing that makes it reasonably portable?
I mean, I currently am working with some code that, as part of its readme, has a pip install of a lib -off of master-, and yes, obviously that caused problems. Is the author not a Python developer? Well, he's a researcher. Why is the obvious thing for someone coming naively to develop in the language not building a portable environment?
> Is the author not a Python developer? Well, he's a researcher.
I think this is why the situation is bad in Python: we have too many non-programmers in the community, that simply want something to work and get on with theirs life. If they can get by it by installing a bunch of libraries by running some command incantations as root, they're happy enough.
You don't have this problem with Node because the only niche that Node really matters is Web, and WEB DEVELOPERS know that their environment should be reproducible.
*: Even in Node this isn't really true, since we have yarn vs npm. Ruby is way more stable thanks to bundler.
> we have too many non-programmers in the community, that simply want something to work and get on with theirs life
The impact of those people in the ecosystem is zero, though. They don't inconvenience anyone by producing badly-written libraries, they literally do their job, produce what they want to produce and everyone is happy. I'm not sure why they get lumped in with "this problem".
I don't know why I hear this a lot, it certainly doesn't echo my experience. I've rarely had dependency problems, even the regular requirements.txt (without pinning to specific versions) tends to work well enough on reasonably current code. Pipenv pretty much solves the problem by introducing a lockfile.
