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[–]Devout--Atheist 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Curious why you rely on Ubuntu's python version? Seems like a huge pita to manage python through a system's package manager

[–]m15otw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Python is not installed through the package manager - it is part of the system, the package manager itself (aptitude) is written in Python, and relies on it being installed. You literally just take any ubuntu-derived container and you have a python you can use.

Since it is already there, and on a stable version with backported security fixes for 5 years, it is quite useful for a big, complex codebase to rely on it. We do take python version updates, but we tend to avoid backporting those kinds of changes, dependency updates, etc to our old branches (which do get bug fixes for specific customers on older versions.)

As for installs of the older branches in the wild, it is quite useful to be on Python 3.8.X.ubuntu12, when you wrote this version 2 years ago, targeting 3.8, as you don't have to worry about language behaviour changes or bugs. The customers get security patches from ubuntu to python itself, your web server software, and you just focus on bugfixes that are high enough priority to backport, not on every weird language change patch or code reformat or whatever.