Use pyenv or deprecate Python version management?

[sloria]

The Python version management features of pew currently depend on the maintainer's fork of pythonz, which is currently out of date. Furthermore, the upstream pythonz repo hasn't seen an update in some time.

pyenv is actively maintained and a more complete solution for Python version management. Perhaps pew should use pyenv for pew install, pew list_pythons, etc.

Another option is to deprecate Python version management from pew. It seems from #152 and #146 that users prefer to have fewer required dependencies, so perhaps the correct path is to eventually remove the feature altogether.

[pfmoore]

There are a number of "thumbs up" reactions to this issue, but it's not obvious whether the support is for switching to pyenv, or for dropping Python version management support.

The commands affected would be pew install, pew uninstall, pew list_pythons and pew locate_pythons.

Personally, I use Windows, so the version management support is not something that I have access to, but I'd be in favour of dropping it and letting users maintain their Python versions outside of pew. But it's probably a mistake to let the decision be made by someone who doesn't use the feature :-)

I do agree that we should probably use a more actively maintained tool if we are going to continue support (it looks like pythonz maintains a list of Python versions that it supports here, which is mostly up to date, but the forked version here is way out of date).