Is Python support for FreeBSD as good as for say CentOS/Ubuntu/other linux flavors?

Question

The development environment, we use, is FreeBSD. We are evaluating Python for developing some tools/utilities. I am trying to figure out if all/most python packages are available for FreeBSD.

I tried using a CentOS/Ubuntu and it was fairly easy to install python as well as packages (using pip). On FreeBSD, it was not as easy but may be I'm not using the correct steps or am missing something.

We've some tools/utilities on FreeBSD that run locally and I want Python to interact with them - hence, FreeBSD.

Any inputs/pointers would be really appreciated.

Regards Sharad

Answer 1

The assumption that powerful and high-profile existing python tools use a lot of different python packages almost always holds true. We use FreeBSD in our company for quite some time together with a lot of python based tools (web frameworks, py-supervisor, etc.) and we never ran into the issue that a certain tool would not run on freeBSD or not be available for freeBSD.

So to answer your question:

• Yes, all/most python packages are available on FreeBSD

One caveat:

• The freeBSD ports system is really great and will manage all compatibility and dependency issues for you. If you are using it (you probably should), then you might want to avoid pip. We had a problem in the past where the package manager for ruby did not really play well with the ports database and installed a lot of incompatible gems. This was a temporary issue with rubygems but gave us a real headache. We tend to install everything from ports since then and try to avoid 3rd party package managers like composer, pip, gems, etc. Often the ports invoke the package managers but with some additional arguments so they ensure not to break dependencies.