Question on virtualenv (python) and FreeBSD

[Alfred Perlstein]

On 5/31/14 12:50 PM, Marcus von Appen wrote:
> On, Sat May 31, 2014, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>
>> I have details and a workaround on my blog here (less messy than pasting
>> the entire 200+ lines of info into this message):
>> http://splbio.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/using-djangosqlalchemy-and-virtualenv-on-freebsd/
>>
>> Basically it seems that because we don't by default ship sqlite with
>> Python we wind up with this odd situation where the virtualenv'd Python
>> can't be used for the apps that I tend to use.
>>
>> I'm wondering can something be done to make virtualenv work better out
>> of the box for people?
> Shouldn't that be rephrased to "make virtualenv work better out of the box
> with my applications requiring package X?"
>
> Sorry for nit-picking here. We strip certain parts of a Python default
> installation, which others might or might not do. One could create a FAQ, what
> to watch or which additional packages are recommended for installation. Right
> now, I do not see a huge issue here, though.
>
> If this is a problem that someone sees as more critical for users, we should
> rethink the customized Python installation process, which however also means
> that users would have to install more dependencies, when they just want a
> simple Python interpreter.

No problem with nit-picking here.  In the opposite direction I wouldn't 
say "my", I would say "the majority of people using python in web 
stacks" which is huge these days.  Basically the suggested way of 
setting up django and sqlalchemy does not work via the HOWTOs for Linux 
and OS X that are out there without what appears to be somewhat hard to 
figure out commands to "fixup" the virtualenv install.

As far as a huge issue, I actually see one, the recommended way to do 
apps these days is using these virtual containers, that being virtualenv 
under python and rvm under ruby.

In fact it's the best way to make your apps easily distributable across 
your org.

At the end of the day taking a look at what other OS's are doing and how 
the HOWTOs are structured would go a long way to getting FreeBSD more 
traction in the webstack community, this is not only my opnion, but the 
opinion of the younger people on my team who suggested that I bring this up.

They, the younger devs on my team would not have the time nor 
inclination to debug this and would simply say "lol, I guess it's time 
to download ubuntu where this howto will work".  For them the OS is a 
tool that should just work, not really what they are all that interested 
in for day to day.  The fact that I get to hack on FreeBSD is a product 
of FreeBSD being a great platform for these python apps.

Sorry for the harsh words, it's not intended, I'm just not sure how to 
otherwise express the need here for us to support these stacks out of 
the box.

A few questions, but feel free to comments on all:
1) Does the concept of a "python-lite" port make sense where the default 
is a larger subset of the default python packages you get on other 
machines?
-Or-
2) perhaps we should simply just add sqlite as that seems to be the only 
blocker I've seen thus far to get this working for the two important web 
stacks?
3) do we care about making it out-of-the-box easy for people running web 
services/stacks like django and sqlalchemy+flask on FreeBSD in the 
recommended fashion?
3) other?

thank you Marcus.

-Alfred