My personal approach has been to use conda for binary management and a place to stuff libraries (could just as easily use venv here), but the key tool I'm using

My personal approach has been to use conda for binary management and a place to stuff libraries (could just as easily use venv here), but the key tool I'm using to pin libraries and avoid transitive dependency drift is pip-compile. Frankly the invocations are so arcane for these various supporting tools that I have been distributing a standard Makefile to projects to hide the complexity - "What's old is new again"!