Which distro do we support ?

[Hritik14]

The installation instructions mention

System requirements

Python 3.8+
PostgreSQL 9+
Compiler toolchain and development files for Python and PostgreSQL

On Debian-based distros, these can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install python3-venv python3-dev postgresql libpq-dev build-essential

But as per https://packages.debian.org/buster/all/allpackages, all the packages listed above are already present in a debian buster installation.

We should explicitly mention which Debian we support ( and have some tests to prove that ). Supporting distros based on Debian is OK and dependencies for those should be mentioned separately.

A point to note: Our CI tests run on ubuntu-latest (we don't have a lot of choices there) and our Dockerfile uses python:3.8 which on buildpack-deps

[pombredanne]

We should list exactly what we support, what we test on and what should be working.

[pombredanne]

we should still list the system packages we need, even if included in Buster (I would doubt postgreSQL is installed by default though)

[Hritik14]

@pombredanne Yes, postgres is installed. Have a look in the link mentioned above.

we should still list the system packages we need

But that get out of hand pretty soon. Do we need to list Git ? svn ? what about other small packages that are usually taken for granted ?

[pombredanne]

package-wise, everything you would install and need explicitly above an beyond the bare OS should be listed
and if we use git and svn in production, this includes them too