The premise of an installer is pretty scary to me. Its so unclear to me what is going to happen to my system, or how I'd undo it. The Aider instructions/installer was not something I felt like I could use.
There also weren't docs for building/running it from source, which is usually what if recent Debian packages aren't available (they aren't).
It took some tinkering (chaotically trying uv sync, uv venv commands, hacking pyproject.toml lightly after hitting some errors)… but eventually I built a wrapper script that runs:
uv run --project /opt/aider-git aider $*
There was definitely considerable angst over this process. I've rarely seen a project that left me so without guidance for how to run it myself. Wading into python projects often feels like it requires a long history of python packager/build tools knowledge, and has brought me considerably suffering. I've muddled through many dozens of projects, but never a moment of illumination, a feeling that I grok the scene, understand the pieces and how the tool is working those components together. There's lots of different tools & epochs of python, and it feels like there's no core truth, just many different semi-overlapping styles and techniques and you need context & experience to figure out what to apply.
Where-as node_modules and package.json#scripts have felt so direct, isolated, self explanatory to me. Feeling super abandoned by python tooling is a feeling I'm used to. It was, at least, some comfort to have squeaked out a win once again though!
Thanks for trying aider! Sorry to hear you had trouble with the install. Installing Python cli tools is tricky, which is why I recommend using the uv-based installer.
The docs do list a variety of other install methods:
There also weren't docs for building/running it from source, which is usually what if recent Debian packages aren't available (they aren't).
It took some tinkering (chaotically trying uv sync, uv venv commands, hacking pyproject.toml lightly after hitting some errors)… but eventually I built a wrapper script that runs:
uv run --project /opt/aider-git aider $*
There was definitely considerable angst over this process. I've rarely seen a project that left me so without guidance for how to run it myself. Wading into python projects often feels like it requires a long history of python packager/build tools knowledge, and has brought me considerably suffering. I've muddled through many dozens of projects, but never a moment of illumination, a feeling that I grok the scene, understand the pieces and how the tool is working those components together. There's lots of different tools & epochs of python, and it feels like there's no core truth, just many different semi-overlapping styles and techniques and you need context & experience to figure out what to apply.
Where-as node_modules and package.json#scripts have felt so direct, isolated, self explanatory to me. Feeling super abandoned by python tooling is a feeling I'm used to. It was, at least, some comfort to have squeaked out a win once again though!