Today I had to downgrade fastapi from 0.114.0 to 0.112.4 to make a software work. And it just hit me - what if pip didn’t support 0.112.4 anymore? We would lose a good piece of software just because of that.

Of course, we can “freeze” the packages into an executable that will run for as long as the OS supports it. Which is a lot longer. But the executable is closed source. We can’t see the code that is run from an executable.

Therefore, there is a need for an alternative to which we still have access to the packages even after the program is built. That would make it safely unnecessary for pip to store all versions of all packages forever more.

Any ideas?

  • CameronDev@programming.dev
    401·
    2 months ago

    If its an open source project, the answer is to rebuild from the tagged source.

    Eg: https://github.com/fastapi/fastapi/tree/0.112.4

    With the right repo setup, you can pip install git+https://github.com/fastapi/fastapi.git@0.112.4 (example only, not sure it works), so pypi doesn’t need to keep all previous wheels, its just easier for it to do so.