Tom Keffer <[email protected]> writes:

> One of the reasons why I have come to prefer using pip and virtual
> environments over the package installers. It's super easy to maintain
> "known-good" versions of the Python run environment.

Yes, but this leads to having multiple copies of everything and no way
to audit that any of them are out of date.  And when they are, you can't
update them without breaking the property you want, that they are the
known-working ones.  Once a library is no longer maintained, there's no
reason to expect any vulnerabilities to be noticed or reported, so I
consider no-longer-maintained versions as basically unsafe (in a mild
perhaps kind of way, but still).

The real issue is that projects maintaining libraries break backwards
compatibility, and on the other hand LTS distributions have egregiously
old code.  Thus projects like weewx have to support the current as well
as very old releases, or users have trouble.  If that ends up being too
hard, I lean to supporting the current release and as far back as isn't
painful, not worrying too much about LTS.  That's what I've done
maintaining unison, where we've desupported quite old ocaml versions
still in LTS distributions.

In this case, it seems the source adaptation wasn't that hard, which was
fortunate.  If this is hard for some library, that's a clue that the
library is too unstable to use, which I realize is easier said than
actually switching away from.

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