Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your implication is that pyenv, virtualenv, and pip should be 3 different tools. But for the average developer, these tools are all related to managing the python environment and versions which in my head sounds like one thing. Other languages don't have 3 different tools for this. pip and virtualenv also add a ton of complexity and when they break (which happens quite often) debugging it is even harder despite them…
Yeah, I agree. In particular it seems insane to me that virtualenv should have to exist. I can't see any valid use case for a machine-global pool of dependencies. Why would anyone think it should be a separate tool rather than just the obvious thing that a dependency manager does? I say this as someone with nearly 20 years of Python experience. It's the same sort of deal with pyenv--the Python version is itself a dep…
`virtualenv` is a heavy-duty third-party library that adds functionality to the standard library venv. Or rather, venv was created as a subset of virtualenv in Python 3.3, and the projects have diverged since.
The standard library `venv` provides "obvious thing that a dependency manager does" functionality, so that every dependency manager has the opportunity to use it, and so that developers can also choose to work at a lower level. And the virtual-environment standard needs to exist so that Python can know about the pool of dependencies thus stored. Otherwise you would be forced to... depend on the dependency manager to start Python and tell it where its dependency pool is.
Fundamentally, the only things a venv needs are the `pyvenv.cfg` config file, the appropriate folder hierarchy, and some symlinks to Python (stub executables on Windows). All it's doing is providing a place for that "pool of dependencies" to exist, and providing configuration info so that Python can understand the dependency path at startup. The venvs created by the standard library module — and by uv — also provide "activation" scripts to manipulate some environment variables for ease of use; but these are completely unnecessary to making the system work.
Fundamentally, tools like uv create the same kind of virtual environment that the standard library does — because there is only one kind. Uv doesn't bootstrap pip into its environments (since that's slow and would be pointless), but you can equally well disable that with the standard library: `python -m venv --without-pip`.
> the Python version is itself a dependency of most libraries
This is a strange way of thinking about it IMO. If you're trying to obtain Python libraries, it's normally because you already have Python, and want to obtain libraries that are compatible with the Python you already have, so that you can write Python code that uses the libraries and works under that Python.
If you're trying to solve the problem of deploying an application to people who don't have Python (or to people who don't understand what Python is), you need another layer of wrapping anyway. You aren't going to get end users to install uv first.