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Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

emily.space

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Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#131

Post by throwaway894345 »

xmprt wrote: post #72
kyt wrote: post #21

I must be the odd man out but I am not a fan of uv. 1. It tries to do too many things. Please just do one thing and do it well. It's simultaneously trying to replace pip, pyenv, virtualenv, and ruff in one command. 2. You end up needing to use `uv pip` so it's not even a full replacement for pip. 3. It does not play well with Docker. 4. It adds more complexity. You end up needing to understand all of these new enviro…

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 dependency of most libraries, so it's a little silly to have a dependency manager that only manages some dependencies.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#132

Post by 85392_school »

kardos wrote: post #46
LeoPanthera wrote: post #18

For single-file Python scripts, which 99% of mine seem to be, you can simplify your life immensely by just putting this at the top of the script: #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script # /// script # requires-python = ">=3.11" # dependencies = [ "modules", "here" ] # /// The script now works like a standalone executable, and uv will magically install and use the specified modules.

> uv will magically install and use the specified modules. As long as you have internet access, and whatever repository it's drawing from is online, and you may get different version of python each time, ...

You can constrain Python version: https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/#:~:text=requires-python

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#133

Post by PaulHoule »

kardos wrote: post #92
dekhn wrote: post #58

I hadn't paid any attention to rust before uv, but since starting to use uv, I've switched a lot of my performance-sensitive code dev to rust (with interfaces to python). These sorts of improvements really do improve my quality of life significantly. My hope is that conda goes away completely. I run an ML cluster and we have multi-gigabyte conda directories and researchers who can't reproduce anything because just to…

It would be nice indeed if there was a good solution to multi-gigabyte conda directories. Conda has been reproducible in my experience with pinned dependencies in the environment YAML... slow to build, sure, but reproducible.

I'd argue bzip compression was a mistake for Conda. There was a time when I had Conda packages made for the CUDA libraries so conda could locally install the right version of CUDA for every project, but boy it took forever for Conda to unpack 100MB+ packages.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#134

Post by sirfz »

aerhardt wrote: post #26

I'm surprised by how much I prefer prepending "uv" to everything instead of activating environments - which is still naturally an option if that's what floats your boat. I also like how you can manage Python versions very easily with it. Everything feels very "batteries-included" and yet local to the project. I still haven't used it long enough to tell whether it avoids the inevitable bi-yearly "debug a Python enviro…

I use mise with uv to automatically activate a project's venv but prefixing is still useful sometimes since it would trigger a sync in case you forgot to do it.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#135

Post by lelandbatey »

zahlman wrote: post #95
aerhardt wrote: post #26

I'm surprised by how much I prefer prepending "uv" to everything instead of activating environments - which is still naturally an option if that's what floats your boat. I also like how you can manage Python versions very easily with it. Everything feels very "batteries-included" and yet local to the project. I still haven't used it long enough to tell whether it avoids the inevitable bi-yearly "debug a Python enviro…

> how much I prefer prepending "uv" to everything instead of activating environments You can also prepend the path to the virtual environment's bin/ (or Scripts/ on Windows). Literally all that "activating an environment" does is to manipulate a few environment variables. Generally, it puts the aforementioned directory on the path, sets $VIRTUAL_ENV to the venv root, configures the prompt (on my system that means mod…

I agree, once I learned (early in my programming journey) what the PATH is as a concept, I have never had an environment problem.

However, I also think many people, even many programmers, basically consider such external state "too confusing" and also don't know how they'd debug such a thing. Which I think is a shame since once you see that it's pretty simple it becomes a tool you can use everywhere. But given that people DON'T want to debug such, I can understand them liking a tool like uv.

I do think automatic compiler/interpreter version management is a pretty killer feature though, that's really annoying otherwise typically afaict, mostly because to get non-system wide installs typically seems to require compiling yourself.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#136

Post by czbond »

hglaser wrote: post #69

Am I the only one who feels like this is obviated by Docker? uv is a clear improvement over pip and venv, for sure. But I do everything in dev containers these days. Very few things get to install on my laptop itself outside a container. I've gotten so used to this that tools that uninstall/install packages on my box on the fly give me the heebie-jeebies.

> I do everything in dev containers these days. Very few things get to install on my laptop itself outside a container.

Yes, it was the NPM supply chain issues that really forced this one me. Now I install, fetch, build in an interactive Docker container

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#137

Post by collinmanderson »

asaddhamani wrote: post #37

I find the python tooling so confusing now. There’s pip, virtualenv, pipx, uv, probably half a dozen others I’m missing. I like node, npm isolates by default, npx is easy to understand, and the ecosystem is much less fragmented. I see a python app on GitHub and they’re all listing different package management tools. Reminds me of that competing standards xkcd.

> There’s pip, virtualenv, pipx, uv, probably half a dozen others I’m missing...

> Reminds me of that competing standards xkcd.

Yes, for years I've sat on the sidelines avoiding the fragmented Poetry, ppyenv, pipenv, pipx, pip-tools/pip-compile, rye, etc, but uv does now finally seem to be the all-in-one solution that seems to be succeeding where other tools have failed.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#138

Post by knowitnone3 »

xmprt wrote: post #72
kyt wrote: post #21

I must be the odd man out but I am not a fan of uv. 1. It tries to do too many things. Please just do one thing and do it well. It's simultaneously trying to replace pip, pyenv, virtualenv, and ruff in one command. 2. You end up needing to use `uv pip` so it's not even a full replacement for pip. 3. It does not play well with Docker. 4. It adds more complexity. You end up needing to understand all of these new enviro…

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…

"other languages don't have 3 different tools for this." But other languages DO have 3 different tools so we should do that too!

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#139

Post by throwaway894345 »

nicce wrote: post #106
xmprt wrote: post #72

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…

Python versions and environments can be solved in more reliable abstraction level as well, e.g. if you are heavy Nix user.

On the other hand, Nix and Bazel and friends are a lot of pain. I'm sure the tradeoff makes sense in a lot of situations, but not needing to bring in Nix or Bazel just to manage dependencies is a pretty big boon. It would be great to see some of the all-in-one build tools become more usable though. Maybe one day it will seem insane that every language ecosystem has its own build tool because there's some all-in-one tool that is just as easy to use as `(car)go build`!
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