[BBLISA] OS libraries vs. pip/gem/cpan/etc.?

[John Miller]

Hi folks,

In the past, I've always defaulted to using whatever programming libraries
that came packaged with my OS -- Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc.  If I
couldn't find something I needed, I grabbed it from my language's
repositories: pip, gem, cpan, etc.  This has the advantage of getting
security updates from the OS vendor, as well as getting libraries
guaranteed to work with apache/nginx/etc.

These days, I'm not so sure this is always a great idea: you need external
packages, but run into version incompatibilites with system packages.  You
also have to keep track of which packages come from which source.  Thus a
second method would be to install as much as possible from pip/cpan/gem/etc.

What are folks' takes on this problem?  I'm hearing about the latter method
more and more lately; would like to hear everyone's experiences.

John
-- 
John Miller
Systems Engineer
Brandeis University
johnmill at brandeis.edu
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