No matter what small tooling changes come about, the Python packaging ecosystem is fundamentally flawed, and will always be more complicated and less useful tha

No matter what small tooling changes come about, the Python packaging ecosystem is fundamentally flawed, and will always be more complicated and less useful than others such as Maven (yes, Maven). The primary reason is that setup.py, etc., have you download/manage one set of dependencies for each project you're working on rather than simply housing all dependencies in a common folder, separated by version, as Maven does. It's pointlessly redundant. But the real pain comes when you start to install things. Since in Python land, dependencies for all tools are typically stored in the same folder, you very easily and quickly hit version conflicts since the dependencies are not really segregated by version. This leads to brutal bugs that creep on you at runtime when you realize, too late, that some tool you installed has dependencies that conflict with another. What's worse, complex Python projects like OpenStack may have numerous dependencies which all in turn have differing and conflicting dependency versions of their own. Trying to keep them all in sync is a ridiculous exercise in time wasting and pointlessness, and problems caused by version mismatches are common. The brilliant solution (sarcasm here), of course, is to create virtual environments with separate copies of every dependency for every tool we run. Again, pointlessly redundant and a pain to manage. Is there a better way? Obviously. Use a single common repo with dependencies structurally segregated by version (ie: different folders), as is the way of doing things in Java-land. I know that Java-land stuff is bad and we're all supposed to hate it. But I've always failed to understand why developers in other language ecosystems continue to create tools in a vacuum, as if roadmaps for solving these problems don't already exist elsewhere. Look beyond your bubble. Hopefully one day the Python folks will catch on.