Linux Administration Cookbook

When to use programming-language package managers

So, here is the thing.

Ansible and Chef are available in the Ubuntu repositories, carefully tailored and packaged for Ubuntu systems the world over.

So, why would I use Pip to install it instead?

It's simple; at the time of writing, the Ansible version in the Ubuntu repositories is 2.5.1, and the version in the PyPI repository is 2.7.0, which is quite a significant bump.

If you want the latest and greatest features of a program, or newer libraries than your distribution ships, you may very well find yourself tempted to install outside of Apt, and that's not necessarily a problem. The problem is remembering how all these packages are installed, and making sure that you know how to keep each ...