# Interesting python links

**URL:** https://forum.access-hive.org.au/t/interesting-python-links/6106
**Category:** Research Software Community
**Tags:** python, testing
**Created:** [26 March 2026 00:41 UTC](https://forum.access-hive.org.au/t/interesting-python-links/6106 "2026-03-26T00:41:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Aidan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.access-hive.org.au/aidan/32/42_2.png) [@Aidan](https://forum.access-hive.org.au/u/Aidan)
#### Post date: [26 March 2026 00:41 UTC](https://forum.access-hive.org.au/t/interesting-python-links/6106/1 "2026-03-26T00:41:35Z")

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The always interesting Earthmover folks have developed [third-wheel](https://github.com/earth-mover/third-wheel), a neat tool to be able to install multiple versions of the same library in a python virtual environment.

The use case is described in this blog post:

> **[Cursed venvs, Confident Releases: Testing Icechunk Across Major Versions -...](https://earthmover.io/blog/cursed-venvs-confident-releases-testing-icechunk-across-major-versions)**
>
> Ian Hunt-Isaak Xarray Community Developer tl;dr: Technical details of how we do surgery on python wheels in order to do cross version compatibility testing. We’re getting ready to release Icechunk V2 — the next evolution of our tensor storage engine....

TL;DR: use this tool if you want to test different versions in the same `pytest`, e.g. write a file with one version and read with the other and vice versa.

The blog post also namechecks [Hypothesis](https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html) which is a useful python library for generating python test cases to more thoroughly exercise your testing functions.