The flaws of python's packaging system (as well as the GIL and other hangups) emerge from the tradeoffs of inventing a language optimised for reusing and connecting as many disparate system binaries as possible.
Its not surprising that such a server scripting language is tightly coupled with the server environment that it runs in. Docker is just one way to ensure a reproducible server environment across machines.
- Make dependency resolution deterministic by default. Unfortunately the whole ecosystem has to buy into it, but the benefits are huge.
- Stop building castles of sand by making more layers of tooling that have to run in Python (and will therefore run in some random poorly managed Python). The language install can't manage the build system install - if anything the build system install should manage the language install. Adding pip to the language distribution was such a backwards decision that it marks the point where I gave up on Python ever fixing their stuff.
- Ignore Linux system package managers (apt etc.), they have a fundamentally broken model and will infect your language ecosystem with that breakage if you try to cater to them.
