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I use Python but I’m not a professional Python programmer. I use pip and venv, with requirements.txt. It copies Python binary and some of the shared standard li

• PufPufPuf 2y ago
  That's generally fine until the build breaks due to a transitive dependency several levels down releasing a breaking change. While requirements.txt may hold enough information to build the project now, it is not guaranteed to work in the future -- you would need lockfiles for that guarantee. I've seen projects sort of emulating this by using "requirements.in" to list direct program dependencies, and auto-generating "requirements.txt" using "pip freeze". But when you find yourself doing that, it's probably time to switch to Poetry.
  • aborsy 2y ago
    I thought pip freeze > requirements.txt lists direct dependencies, as well as the transitive dependencies, and includes exact version numbers. From system, it copies the relevant binaries. In the future, pip install requirements.txt will install the exact same set of packages at those pinned versions. Unless the system components drastically change, the build is deterministic and project should run in the future. Sure, in the future if you change the version number for one package, the build might break, but that’s expected. It looks like the lock files specify the dependency graph, hashes of each package, URLs, and metadata about the system, so they do better when a package is updated.