> Most of the time you don't need a different Python version from the system one.
Except for literally anytime you’re collaborating with anyone, ever? I can’t even begin to imagine working on a project where folks just use whatever python version their OS happens to ship with. Do you also just ship the latest version of whatever container because most of the time nothing has changed?
If you're writing Python tools to support OS operations in prod, you need to target the system Python. It's wildly impractical to deploy venvs for more than one or two apps, especially if they're relatively small. Developing in a local venv can help with that targeting, but there's no substitute for doing that directly on the OS you're deploying to.
This is why you DON'T write system tools in Python in the first place. Use a real language that compiles to a native self contained binary that doesn't need dependency installing. Or you use a container. This has been a solved problem for decades. Python users have been trying to drag the entire computing world backwards this whole time because their insistence on using a toy language invented to be the JavaScript of the server, as an actual production grade bare metal system language
Except for literally anytime you’re collaborating with anyone, ever? I can’t even begin to imagine working on a project where folks just use whatever python version their OS happens to ship with. Do you also just ship the latest version of whatever container because most of the time nothing has changed?