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Uv overtakes pip in CI

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Re: Uv overtakes pip in CI

#31

Post by falcor84 »

simonw wrote: post #22
torben-friis wrote: post #10

As an outsider to python, I never got how a language who got popular for being simple, elegant and readable could end up with perhaps the most complex tooling situation (dependencies, envs, etc). Any time I glance at the community there seems to be a new way of doing things. What caused python to go through these issues? Is there any fundamental design flaw ?

It's mostly about age. Python has been around for 35 years now. The first version of a Python package directory was the cheeseshop (Monthy Python reference) in 2003. The earliest version of a pip-like tool was "easy_install" which - I kid you not - worked by scraping the HTML listing page of the cheeseshop and downloading zip files linked from that! More recent languages like Node.js and Rust and Go all got to create…

On a tangent, the somewhat related issue of Python 3 not being able to import Python 2 packages famously led Zed Shaw of "Learn Python the Hard Way" to write a rant about how Python is not Turing Complete. I checked again and apparently he removed that rant and only has a disclaimer in its place mentioning that he was obviously being hyperbolic [0].

[0] https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/nopython3.html#the-py...

Re: Uv overtakes pip in CI

#32

Post by javchz »

lvl155 wrote: post #16
torben-friis wrote: post #10

As an outsider to python, I never got how a language who got popular for being simple, elegant and readable could end up with perhaps the most complex tooling situation (dependencies, envs, etc). Any time I glance at the community there seems to be a new way of doing things. What caused python to go through these issues? Is there any fundamental design flaw ?

I call it the JS-syndrome.

As many flaws as the npm/yarn/pnpm ecosystem has, its interoperability is waaaay better than the whole juggling act between pip, ven, poetry, Anaconda, Miniforge, and uv across projects.

UV it's a step in the right direction, but legacy projects without Dockerfile can be tricky to start.

Re: Uv overtakes pip in CI

#33

Post by mikepurvis »

torben-friis wrote: post #10

As an outsider to python, I never got how a language who got popular for being simple, elegant and readable could end up with perhaps the most complex tooling situation (dependencies, envs, etc). Any time I glance at the community there seems to be a new way of doing things. What caused python to go through these issues? Is there any fundamental design flaw ?

Python 2.0 was released in October 2000. The Python ecosystem has witnessed several significant shifts in expectation as far as how software is built and delivered, from Slackware-style source builds to vendor packages to containers to uv just downloading a standalone binary archive. And the deadsnakes ppa and venvs, plus the ongoing awkwardness about whether pip should be writing stuff into usr/local or ~/.local or something else.

All of this alongside the rise of GitHub and free CI builders, it being trivial to depend on lots of other packages of unknown provenance, stdlib packages being completely sidelined by stuff like requests.

It’s really only in the last ten years or so that there’s been the clarity of what is a build backend vs frontend, what a lock file is and how workspace management fits into the whole picture. Distutils and setuptools are in there too.

Basically, Python’s packaging has been a mess for a long time, but uv getting almost everything right all of a sudden isn’t an accident; it’s an abrupt gelling of ideas that have been in progress for two decades.

Re: Uv overtakes pip in CI

#34

Post by scuff3d »

ThibWeb wrote: post #9
bognition wrote: post #3

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been using Python and has tried uv. Python dependency management and environments have been a pain for 15 years. Poetry was nice but slow and sometimes difficult. Uv is lightning fast and damn easy to use. It’s so functional and simple.

for me the surprise is the pace? I’d expect people to be more set in their tools that it takes longer than a few months for a new tool, no matter how good, to become the majority use one. Though perhaps people adopt new tools more easily in CI where install times matter more

uv was really smart in the way they integrated with existing solutions. My whole team just switched over from pip, and it was painless. We were already using pyproject.toml files which made it even easier, but uv also has documentation for transitioning from requirements.txt files.

Re: Uv overtakes pip in CI

#35

Post by hodanli »

nomel wrote: post #11
gatvol wrote: post #4

UV is super fast and great for environment management, however it's not at all well suited to a containerised environment, unless I'm missing something fundamental (unless you like using an env in your container that is).

The only reason I haven't switched is its still barely-there support for air-gapped systems [1]. And lack of non-local venv support [2]. [1] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/10203 [2] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/1495

Same here. I still use conda from time to time for this.

Re: Uv overtakes pip in CI

#36

Post by greenavocado »

WD-42 wrote: post #21
ThibWeb wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for me the surprise is the pace? I’d expect people to be more set in their tools that it takes longer than a few months for a new tool, no matter how good, to become the majority use one. Though perhaps people adopt new tools more easily in CI where install times matter more

I think it’s been long enough now. Uv just has so much velocity. Pyproject.toml and pep support just keeps getting better. Poetry which I think is the closest analogue, still requires a [tool.poetry.depenencies] section afaik.

You don't even need to edit any files yourself for most simple use cases.

    uv init
    uv add package
    uv run program.py
That's it.

If you inherit a codebase made this way from someone else, merely running uv run program.py will automatically create, launch the venv, configure packages, run your script, seamlessly on first launch.

Uv lets you almost forget virtual environments exist. Almost.

Re: Uv overtakes pip in CI

#37

Post by scuff3d »

gatvol wrote: post #4

UV is super fast and great for environment management, however it's not at all well suited to a containerised environment, unless I'm missing something fundamental (unless you like using an env in your container that is).

Works fine in containers as far as I can tell. I don't even bother configuring it to not use a venv. Doesn't hurt anything

Re: Uv overtakes pip in CI

#38

Post by lukeschlather »

ThibWeb wrote: post #9
bognition wrote: post #3

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been using Python and has tried uv. Python dependency management and environments have been a pain for 15 years. Poetry was nice but slow and sometimes difficult. Uv is lightning fast and damn easy to use. It’s so functional and simple.

for me the surprise is the pace? I’d expect people to be more set in their tools that it takes longer than a few months for a new tool, no matter how good, to become the majority use one. Though perhaps people adopt new tools more easily in CI where install times matter more

I feel like I've tried at least 5 different package management tools for python. Between pip, poetry, pip-tools, pipx, I'm not really sure what easy_install, egg, pkg_info are, but I do know I have always been surprised I need to care.

It sounds like uv is a drop-in replacement for pip, pipx, and poetry with all of their benefits and none of the downsides, so I don't see why I wouldn't migrate to it overnight.

Re: Uv overtakes pip in CI

#40

Post by andy99 »

bognition wrote: post #3

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been using Python and has tried uv. Python dependency management and environments have been a pain for 15 years. Poetry was nice but slow and sometimes difficult. Uv is lightning fast and damn easy to use. It’s so functional and simple.

I’ll bite - I could care less about speed, that feels like a talking point I see often repeated despite other package managers not being particularly slow. Maybe there’s some workload I’m missing that this is more important for?

I’ve tried uv a couple places where it’s been forced on me, and it didn’t work for whatever reason. I know thats anecdotal and I’m sure it mostly works, but it obviously was off putting. For better or worse I know how to use conda, and despite having to special attachment to it, slightly faster with a whole different set of rough edges is not at all compelling.

I have a feeling this is some kind of Rust fan thing and that’s where the push comes from, to try and insinuate it into more people’s workflows.

I’d like to hear a real reason I would ever migrate to it, and honestly if there isn’t one, am super annoyed about having it forced on me.

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