5 ms·

[context: honest question from occasional Python user] What's wrong with poetry?

by 1attice 2y ago

sghiassy 2y ago
It doesn’t work consistently across environments
- 1attice 2y ago
  Could you explain futher? By 'environment' do you mean platform?
  - sghiassy 2y ago
    Like during dev setup, does it work on your friends laptop but not yours, even though you’re both running MacOS latest (this was my experience) Or it works on your laptop but not a CI machine (also my experience). What we want is for a declarative toml file to reliably reproduce dependencies regardless… sadly even across very similar machines it fails to do so.
    - cmcconomy 2y ago
      isnt this what the lockfile is for? are people installing poetry lock dependencies on macos that turn out different?
      - mixmastamyk 2y ago
        Probably have different versions of Python installed manually. And/or architecture different.
      - sghiassy 2y ago
        I’d recommend reading about Python Wheels - https://realpython.com/python-wheels https://realpython.com/python-wheels Unlike, say NPM, Python doesn’t just download a versioned set of python files depending on your lock file
theusus 2y ago
Does it automatically install and setup the required Python version for the project?
- VagabundoP 2y ago
  Yes. You choose a standard version (usually the latest stable 3.12 currently) that it downloads at setup or it downloads and sets up the pinned version from your pyproject.toml.
zie 2y ago
If poetry works for you, it's fine. It works great 90+% of the time for me and I found it before rye or hatch or whatever, so I use it too. Eventually it will either have to adopt to the new standards as they firm up or it will probably get left in the dust, but that's fine. Hopefully if/when that happens something like rye will be mature and boring and well supported everywhere instead. The latest tools are not always the best tools, old and boring, as long as they work for you are perfectly fine.
3PS 2y ago
Poetry has two flaws imo: 1. It's written in Python, which makes it slower and prone to bootstrapping issues. 2. It doesn't manage your Python installation, which necessitates the use of a tool like pyenv. Rye sidesteps both of those by (a) being written in Rust and (b) trying to solve all of the problems solved by poetry and pyenv in one go.
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  I like that it doesn't manage the python/venv installation. E.g. rye creates a .venv for every project and in case of packages that are large, that starts to add up as more projects are added. With poetry, I can separately create a "common" virtualenv which I can use with bunch of throwaway projects; this is of course assuming that the version requirements of these projects do not clash - if they do, I can always create another virtualenv. With rye, I activated a virtualenv and then created a new project, it proceeded to setup its own .venv within the project instead of just using the one that was already activated.
  - rtpg 2y ago
    I would like for more venv sharing, but rye is leaning heavily into correctness, which (in the current Python universe) is much easier to do by recreating the world.
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  I would consider both of those flaws of Rye, not Poetry. Python package managers not written in Python will by definition have less contributors, and to me, they make Python look like a toy language (you can't write a package manager, a fairly trivial program with the exception of dependency management, in Python - what can you write then?) As for managing Pythons, I would consider this to be orthogonal to packaging, and the default system Python is often good enough.
  - thelastbender12 2y ago
    I think this is a fine opinion, we like tools that do exactly how much we want them to. But I'd suggest setting up python (and virtual envs) was actually a big headache for a lot of newer users, and some of the old ones (me that is). I also don't see why leaning into python being a wrapper around rust/cpp/c is a bad thing. Each language has its own niche and packaging/bootstrapping is more of a systems level language problem.
fire_lake 2y ago
Poetry struggles with complex packages like PyTorch.
agoose77 2y ago
https://iscinumpy.dev/post/poetry-versions/ https://iscinumpy.dev/post/poetry-versions/

[context: honest question from occasional Python user] What's wrong with poetry?

sghiassy 2y ago

It doesn’t work consistently across environments

1attice 2y ago
Could you explain futher? By 'environment' do you mean platform?
- sghiassy 2y ago
  Like during dev setup, does it work on your friends laptop but not yours, even though you’re both running MacOS latest (this was my experience) Or it works on your laptop but not a CI machine (also my experience). What we want is for a declarative toml file to reliably reproduce dependencies regardless… sadly even across very similar machines it fails to do so.
  - cmcconomy 2y ago
    isnt this what the lockfile is for? are people installing poetry lock dependencies on macos that turn out different?
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Probably have different versions of Python installed manually. And/or architecture different.
    - sghiassy 2y ago
      I’d recommend reading about Python Wheels - https://realpython.com/python-wheels https://realpython.com/python-wheels Unlike, say NPM, Python doesn’t just download a versioned set of python files depending on your lock file

theusus 2y ago

Does it automatically install and setup the required Python version for the project?

VagabundoP 2y ago
Yes. You choose a standard version (usually the latest stable 3.12 currently) that it downloads at setup or it downloads and sets up the pinned version from your pyproject.toml.

zie 2y ago

If poetry works for you, it's fine. It works great 90+% of the time for me and I found it before rye or hatch or whatever, so I use it too. Eventually it will either have to adopt to the new standards as they firm up or it will probably get left in the dust, but that's fine. Hopefully if/when that happens something like rye will be mature and boring and well supported everywhere instead. The latest tools are not always the best tools, old and boring, as long as they work for you are perfectly fine.

3PS 2y ago

Poetry has two flaws imo: 1. It's written in Python, which makes it slower and prone to bootstrapping issues. 2. It doesn't manage your Python installation, which necessitates the use of a tool like pyenv. Rye sidesteps both of those by (a) being written in Rust and (b) trying to solve all of the problems solved by poetry and pyenv in one go.

noisy_boy 2y ago
I like that it doesn't manage the python/venv installation. E.g. rye creates a .venv for every project and in case of packages that are large, that starts to add up as more projects are added. With poetry, I can separately create a "common" virtualenv which I can use with bunch of throwaway projects; this is of course assuming that the version requirements of these projects do not clash - if they do, I can always create another virtualenv. With rye, I activated a virtualenv and then created a new project, it proceeded to setup its own .venv within the project instead of just using the one that was already activated.
- rtpg 2y ago
  I would like for more venv sharing, but rye is leaning heavily into correctness, which (in the current Python universe) is much easier to do by recreating the world.
Kwpolska 2y ago
I would consider both of those flaws of Rye, not Poetry. Python package managers not written in Python will by definition have less contributors, and to me, they make Python look like a toy language (you can't write a package manager, a fairly trivial program with the exception of dependency management, in Python - what can you write then?) As for managing Pythons, I would consider this to be orthogonal to packaging, and the default system Python is often good enough.
- thelastbender12 2y ago
  I think this is a fine opinion, we like tools that do exactly how much we want them to. But I'd suggest setting up python (and virtual envs) was actually a big headache for a lot of newer users, and some of the old ones (me that is). I also don't see why leaning into python being a wrapper around rust/cpp/c is a bad thing. Each language has its own niche and packaging/bootstrapping is more of a systems level language problem.

fire_lake 2y ago

Poetry struggles with complex packages like PyTorch.

agoose77 2y ago

https://iscinumpy.dev/post/poetry-versions/ https://iscinumpy.dev/post/poetry-versions/