Wiki RaspberryPi installation

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in the wiki

Step 4: Install PySerial

Install PySerial with the command sudo apt-get install python-serial

what should the command line be to get python serial version 3?

answered my own quesiton

after , sudo apt-get update

sudo pip install pyserial --upgrade

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2

Are you saying do the “sudo pip install pyserial --upgrade” instead of “sudo apt-get install python-serial” or in addition to it?

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in addition to it.
the sequence i used was

sudo apt-get install python-serial
sudo pip install pyserial --upgrade

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Interesting. I have seen some instances where you can get yourself into trouble by installing a python package one way (e.g. apt-get) and then trying to upgrade it another way (e.g. pip). However I don’t know enough about the subject to know when that’s likely to be a problem. Anyone out there have more insight? Would something like this be safer?

python -m pip install pyserial
python -m pip install pyserial --upgrade

I don’t have a RasPi to test this on.

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yes, stick to one or the other, mixing them can cause you to have two versions
installed, and depending on how things are run, you may get either one.

I strongly prefer to use the OS packages (apt or yum), but if you need a version
newer than the OS provides, it can be trickier to do than doing everything with
pip

6

So then my next questions/comments are:

  1. Should most RasPi users be using pyserial 3 or should that be an
    optional step in the wiki?
  2. My very brief research (
    https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/68837/pyserial-error-on-raspberry-3)
    indicates that the pyserial repositories tend to not be up-to-date.
  3. Speaking of up-to-date, python 3 is finally starting to emerge as the
    preferred version. When do we make the switch? This may be part of a larger
    discussion across all OSs, but I thought I’d bring it up.
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On the python 2 vs python 3 topic I actually started the project out in 3 but then went back to two. The hang up is that when I last checked the tools to compile to an executable for 3 weren’t quite working reliably yet. As soon as they are I support moving to three.

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