3 ms·

I agree uv is great but let’s not get carried away here. Poetry is good, pip was fine for many use-cases after they added native lock files.

by theptip 7mo ago

PaulHoule 7mo ago
if you are working on one tiny project on your machine that pips in four packages you probably think pip was OK. Circa 2017 I was working on systems that were complex enough that pip couldn't build them and after I got to the bottom of it I knew it not my fault but it was the fault of pip. I built a system which could build usable environments out of pre-built wheels and sketched out the design of a system that was roughly 'uv but written in Python' but saw two problems: (1) a Python dependent system can be destroyed by people messing with Python environments, like my experience is that my poetry gets trashed every six months or so and (2) there was just no awareness by the 'one tiny project on your machine that pips in four packages' people that there was a correctness problem at all and everybody else was blaming themselves for a problem and didn't have a clear understanding of what was wrong with pip or what a correct model for managing python dependencies is (short answer: see maven) or that a 100% correct model was even possible and that we'd have to always settle for a 97% model. The politics looked intractable so I gave up. Now written in rust, uv evaded the bootstrap problem and it dealt with the adoption problem by targeting 'speed' as people would see the value in that even if they didn't see the value in 'correctness'. My system would have been faster than pip because it would have kept a cache, but uv is faster still.
- Affric 7mo ago
  Well said. I have used them all and UV is the only one that actually solves the problem. It’s insane that people would suggest that Python can go back.
- fud101 7mo ago
  > everybody else was blaming themselves for a problem and didn't have a clear understanding of what was wrong with pip or what a correct model for managing python dependencies is (short answer: see maven) I always looked down on the Java ecosystem but if it turns out Maven had a better story all along and we all overlooked it, that's wild.
  - omcnoe 7mo ago
    Maven has its own bone headed design where it SILENTLY resolves conflicting dependency branches through a “closest to dep tree root wins” rule.
- notpushkin 7mo ago
  I still believe Rust is a red herring here. Your ‘uv but written in Python’ would probably have the same success as uv does now, if you did focus on speed over correctness. And I’ve yet to hear about pipx or Poetry getting trashed, but if it is a problem, I don’t think it’s impossible to solve in Python vs Rust. > The politics looked intractable so I gave up. So yeah, this is your actual problem. (Don’t worry, I’m in the same camp here.)
  - tempay 7mo ago
    As much as I'm a Python fan I strongly disagree here that rust is a red herring. Having a static binary makes distribution way simplier. There are a bunch of ways you could try to achive something like in python but it would be significantly larger. Performance-wise writing it in python would have heavy startup overhead and wouldn't be able to get close to the same level of performance. Obviously you could achive the same thing in many other languages, but rust ends up being a really good fit for making a small static binary for this workload of network heavy, IO-bound, async/threading friendly with the occasional bit of CPU heavy work.
  - _ZeD_ 7mo ago
    >>> ‘uv but written in Python’ you mean pdm?
rtpg 7mo ago
Poetry and friends are so bad that many people continued just using pip -r requirements.txt despite knowing about this other stuff Poetry having users isn’t the metric for success. pip having way less users is.
- bmitc 7mo ago
  How is uv awesome and Poetry so bad? They do basically the same things except Astral re-invents the wheel but only part way instead of just relying on the existing tools. uv is fast. As far as I can tell, there's hardly any difference in functionality except for it also replacing PyEnv, which I never use anyway.
  - rtpg 7mo ago
    uv assuming your local Python is busted to hell and back helps a lot with isolation. Poetry's CLI would often, for me, just fall over and crash. Crashing a lot is not a fundamental problem in the sense you can fix the bugs, but hey I'm not hitting uv crashes. pipenv was even worse in terms of just hanging during package resolution. Tools that hang are not tools you want in a CI pipeline! The end result: `uv run` I expect to work. `pipenv` or `poetry` calls I have to assume don't work, have to put retries into CI pipelines and things like that.
  - neves 7mo ago
    uv has a lot of sensible defaults that prevent clueless developers to shoot their own feet. Uv sync, for example, would uninstall packages not in pyproject.toml
    - fud101 7mo ago
      i kind of disagree with this. uv run is clunky, i don't want that. i want to keep the activate the venv and do shit model. i hate uv run as a primitive.
      - rtpg 7mo ago
        I mean you don't need to use that then. `uv` is still writing to `.venv` by default and you can activate it with `direnv` or w/e.
Terretta 7mo ago
let's get carried away. `uv run` a .py with inline script metadata has all the deps installed and your script running in a venv while poetry is still deciding to resolve...

I agree uv is great but let’s not get carried away here. Poetry is good, pip was fine for many use-cases after they added native lock files.

by theptip 7mo ago

I agree uv is great but let’s not get carried away here. Poetry is good, pip was fine for many use-cases after they added native lock files.

PaulHoule 7mo ago

if you are working on one tiny project on your machine that pips in four packages you probably think pip was OK. Circa 2017 I was working on systems that were complex enough that pip couldn't build them and after I got to the bottom of it I knew it not my fault but it was the fault of pip. I built a system which could build usable environments out of pre-built wheels and sketched out the design of a system that was roughly 'uv but written in Python' but saw two problems: (1) a Python dependent system can be destroyed by people messing with Python environments, like my experience is that my poetry gets trashed every six months or so and (2) there was just no awareness by the 'one tiny project on your machine that pips in four packages' people that there was a correctness problem at all and everybody else was blaming themselves for a problem and didn't have a clear understanding of what was wrong with pip or what a correct model for managing python dependencies is (short answer: see maven) or that a 100% correct model was even possible and that we'd have to always settle for a 97% model. The politics looked intractable so I gave up. Now written in rust, uv evaded the bootstrap problem and it dealt with the adoption problem by targeting 'speed' as people would see the value in that even if they didn't see the value in 'correctness'. My system would have been faster than pip because it would have kept a cache, but uv is faster still.

Affric 7mo ago
Well said. I have used them all and UV is the only one that actually solves the problem. It’s insane that people would suggest that Python can go back.
fud101 7mo ago
> everybody else was blaming themselves for a problem and didn't have a clear understanding of what was wrong with pip or what a correct model for managing python dependencies is (short answer: see maven) I always looked down on the Java ecosystem but if it turns out Maven had a better story all along and we all overlooked it, that's wild.
- omcnoe 7mo ago
  Maven has its own bone headed design where it SILENTLY resolves conflicting dependency branches through a “closest to dep tree root wins” rule.
notpushkin 7mo ago
I still believe Rust is a red herring here. Your ‘uv but written in Python’ would probably have the same success as uv does now, if you did focus on speed over correctness. And I’ve yet to hear about pipx or Poetry getting trashed, but if it is a problem, I don’t think it’s impossible to solve in Python vs Rust. > The politics looked intractable so I gave up. So yeah, this is your actual problem. (Don’t worry, I’m in the same camp here.)
- tempay 7mo ago
  As much as I'm a Python fan I strongly disagree here that rust is a red herring. Having a static binary makes distribution way simplier. There are a bunch of ways you could try to achive something like in python but it would be significantly larger. Performance-wise writing it in python would have heavy startup overhead and wouldn't be able to get close to the same level of performance. Obviously you could achive the same thing in many other languages, but rust ends up being a really good fit for making a small static binary for this workload of network heavy, IO-bound, async/threading friendly with the occasional bit of CPU heavy work.
- _ZeD_ 7mo ago
  >>> ‘uv but written in Python’ you mean pdm?

rtpg 7mo ago

Poetry and friends are so bad that many people continued just using pip -r requirements.txt despite knowing about this other stuff Poetry having users isn’t the metric for success. pip having way less users is.

bmitc 7mo ago
How is uv awesome and Poetry so bad? They do basically the same things except Astral re-invents the wheel but only part way instead of just relying on the existing tools. uv is fast. As far as I can tell, there's hardly any difference in functionality except for it also replacing PyEnv, which I never use anyway.
- rtpg 7mo ago
  uv assuming your local Python is busted to hell and back helps a lot with isolation. Poetry's CLI would often, for me, just fall over and crash. Crashing a lot is not a fundamental problem in the sense you can fix the bugs, but hey I'm not hitting uv crashes. pipenv was even worse in terms of just hanging during package resolution. Tools that hang are not tools you want in a CI pipeline! The end result: `uv run` I expect to work. `pipenv` or `poetry` calls I have to assume don't work, have to put retries into CI pipelines and things like that.
- neves 7mo ago
  uv has a lot of sensible defaults that prevent clueless developers to shoot their own feet. Uv sync, for example, would uninstall packages not in pyproject.toml
  - fud101 7mo ago
    i kind of disagree with this. uv run is clunky, i don't want that. i want to keep the activate the venv and do shit model. i hate uv run as a primitive.
    - rtpg 7mo ago
      I mean you don't need to use that then. `uv` is still writing to `.venv` by default and you can activate it with `direnv` or w/e.

Terretta 7mo ago

let's get carried away. `uv run` a .py with inline script metadata has all the deps installed and your script running in a venv while poetry is still deciding to resolve...