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The reason there have been so many is because the standard included tools (pip, venv) are not great. And others could still use improvements. Venv and setup to

by rat87 2y ago

The reason there have been so many is because the standard included tools (pip, venv) are not great. And others could still use improvements. Venv and setup tools aren't really package managers. Pipx is only meant for installing Dev tools per user (in isolated Venvs). pyenv does something a bit different from those tools you listed(maybe it'd part of cones I haven't tried it). Its not a dependency manager its a python version manager like nvm (node version manager). It helps you manage downloading and compiling python from source and it let's you specify python version in a .python-version file and provides a shim to find the right python for a project(compiling it if its not already available). I tried pipenv and despite being hyped for it, it had a lot of issues. Then I tried poetry which seemed much better but was still sort of slow and got stuck updating lock files sometimes. I haven't even tried pdm. Or various conda package managers since its mainly used by scientists with lots of binary dependency needs. Then ~~uv~~ rye came along and seemed to fix things. It replaced pip+pip tools/pipenv/poetry. Also replaced pipx(install python tools in isolated venvs then add it to users ./local/bin). Also replaced pyenv but instead of compiling python which takes a while and can be troublesome it downloads portable builds https://astral.sh/blog/python-build-standalone https://astral.sh/blog/python-build-standalone (which do have some downsides/compatibility issues but are usually better then compiling python). It was also written in rust so avoided circular venv issues that sometimes come with installing python packages since it had a self contained binary(plus some shims). Then UV came along, the projects merged and most development is happening in uv. Despite the rye-> switch most things are pretty similar and I feel a lot of excitement towards it. The one big difference is there's no shims to automatically call the right python for a project from UV. Instead you need to run uv run script.py Astral the guys behind UV took over the independent python builds and have also built the most popular python formater/linter these days - ruff (also written in rust, also fast they're also looking into adding a better type checker for python type hints). I'd reccomend trying it for your next project I think it could become the defacto packaging/version tool for python

zahlman 2y ago
`venv` is fine. The work of just creating the virtual environment is hardly anything, and `venv` really can't screw it up. If you create environments `--without-pip`, it's actually faster than `virtualenv` and `uv venv` in my testing (because those are fundamentally doing the same thing with a little extra window dressing). What slows it down is bootstrapping Pip into the new environment, via the standard library `ensurepip`, which requires running zipped un-bytecode-compiled code from a bundled wheel. (As it happens, this is the exact topic of the blog post I'm currently in the middle of writing.) Pip is indeed not great (understatement - there are many other things about it that I have picked on or will pick on in this series). >Venv and setup tools aren't really package managers. Setuptools nowadays is a build backend. Long ago (when expectations were much lower), Pip had Setuptools as a dependency, and the combination was about as close to a "package manager" as anyone really cared for. But Pip today really can't be called anything like a "package manager" either - it only installs the packages, and resolves dependencies. It records some basic information about the dependency graph of the things it installed - in the sense that it preserves such information from the wheels it installs - but it doesn't really do any processing of that information. If you ask it to remove packages it's (last I checked) not very smart about that. It doesn't help you figure out what packages you need, and it doesn't help you maintain your `pyproject.toml` file. And, of course, it doesn't create or keep track of virtual environments for you. (Pipx does the latter, wrapping Pip and `venv`, but it only installs "application" packages that define an entry point.) Poetry and PDM are the only things listed that really belong to the same category as uv. They're not only package managers, but complete workflow tools. (Conda is a package manager, for languages other than Python as well, but it's not meant to take over your entire Python workflow in the same way.) They even wrap themselves around the process of uploading to PyPI (which seems really excessive to me; seriously, `twine` is fine too.)

by rat87 2y ago

zahlman 2y ago

`venv` is fine. The work of just creating the virtual environment is hardly anything, and `venv` really can't screw it up. If you create environments `--without-pip`, it's actually faster than `virtualenv` and `uv venv` in my testing (because those are fundamentally doing the same thing with a little extra window dressing). What slows it down is bootstrapping Pip into the new environment, via the standard library `ensurepip`, which requires running zipped un-bytecode-compiled code from a bundled wheel. (As it happens, this is the exact topic of the blog post I'm currently in the middle of writing.) Pip is indeed not great (understatement - there are many other things about it that I have picked on or will pick on in this series). >Venv and setup tools aren't really package managers. Setuptools nowadays is a build backend. Long ago (when expectations were much lower), Pip had Setuptools as a dependency, and the combination was about as close to a "package manager" as anyone really cared for. But Pip today really can't be called anything like a "package manager" either - it only installs the packages, and resolves dependencies. It records some basic information about the dependency graph of the things it installed - in the sense that it preserves such information from the wheels it installs - but it doesn't really do any processing of that information. If you ask it to remove packages it's (last I checked) not very smart about that. It doesn't help you figure out what packages you need, and it doesn't help you maintain your `pyproject.toml` file. And, of course, it doesn't create or keep track of virtual environments for you. (Pipx does the latter, wrapping Pip and `venv`, but it only installs "application" packages that define an entry point.) Poetry and PDM are the only things listed that really belong to the same category as uv. They're not only package managers, but complete workflow tools. (Conda is a package manager, for languages other than Python as well, but it's not meant to take over your entire Python workflow in the same way.) They even wrap themselves around the process of uploading to PyPI (which seems really excessive to me; seriously, `twine` is fine too.)