Why it is bad idea to let Ubuntu upgrade Python to 3.10...

in #python2 years ago

Usually it's recommended to let Linux install all the updates, but in case of Ubuntu, sometimes it is better to not install every update.

Python 3.10 is not backwards compatible with versions 3.8 and 3.9, and for some reason, Ubuntu decided not to include all essential modules in the minimal install. When having multiple Python versions installed in parallel, Python 3.10 will remove distutils module from older versions. It will also not upgrade requests and urllib3 modules, which will cause a lot of tools to not start correctly as several symbols have been either removed or moved to compatibility shim.