Enable users to install software with the apt install command.
As i would like to use the python- lib "camelot-py" to read and extract tables out of pdf files. For that the interpreter "ghostscript" is required, which can not be installed with pip/conda.
It is recommended to use the apt install command - however it is currently not allowed in Microsoft Fabric (reference).
Allowing users to use the apt install command would allow users to run more use cases in Fabric that currently need to be deployed in other areas.
2 Comments
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I doubt that this will ever happen, for two reasons:
- The `apt` package manager is specific to Debian Linux (and other Debian-based Linux distributions), but as of this writing, Fabric notebooks appear to be running on a Linux distribution called CBL-Mariner, and it uses the RPM package manager (originally from Red Hat Linux). The `apt` command is not present in the CBL-Mariner Linux that's running under the hood in Fabric, but the `rpm` command is there. So theoretically, you could try to use `rpm` to install the packages you're looking for, but there's another issue:
- Installing packages with a package manager like `apt` or `rpm` in Linux requires superuser (system administrator) privileges, and I can almost guarantee you, that's never going to happen in Fabric. Mostly for security reasons, but also because you could easily brick your Fabric capacity by messing up a single command, and then someone in Microsoft Support would have to fix it for you.
Don't get me wrong, I love that Microsoft has been really embracing Linux recently, but you'll be hard-pressed to find any managed cloud data SaaS provider that will allow you to run Linux shell commands as superuser in a managed environment.
By the way, if you're curious how I know all of this stuff about what's going on under the hood in Fabric, I just ran a few Linux shell commands using the "!" operator in a Fabric notebook. I tried to include the commands and the output I received from them in this post, but the Fabric Ideas website has an extremely paranoid "malicious input" filter which blocks anything that even looks like code, so if you want to know more, find me on LinkedIn or Bluesky and I'll show you what I did.
- Status added:New
