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Python Has Too Many Package Managers

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Re: Python Has Too Many Package Managers

#41

Post by rangerelf »

sealedservant wrote: post #25
slt2021 wrote: post #23

I see a lot of package managers I never head of, am a happy venv & pip user. One of the key faults of pip is what happens when you decide to remove a dependency. Removing a dependency does not actually remove the sub-dependencies that were brought in by the original dependency, leaving a lot of potential cruft. This is not really an issue if your virtual environments are disposable. Just nuke and recreate venv from s…

Virtual environments are cool, and necessary, but at the same time, they are incredibly limited and I always get frustrated at the lack of features they should have. They are too fragile. Nuking a whole venv when you mess up isn't really efficient. They aren't portable. You need to package up your editable project for an offline system? Too bad, virtual environments use hardcoded paths and symlinks that will be broke…

I've read "they're too/so/very fragile" so many times, but nobody has given me an example of how or why they consider them fragile, what steps do I need to do to break them.

Myself? I consider them ephemeral: I create my Makefile with a 'venv' target to delete/rebuild the virtual environment in case of changes. Some do take longer to rebuild, but with a global pip cache it takes much less time to rebuild once it's been done the first time.

Hardcoded paths and symlinks? Not a problem, I know that virtual environments don't travel; and since they're ephemeral if I need it at a different location I can always rebuild them.

Do you have an example for your third paragraph?

And I've done the last one, converted all packages to wheels, uploaded to an artifact server, and used those for production deployments.

I'm curious, really; not bashing you for having troubles with it, but I don't understand the aversion given my lack of blockers when using them.

Re: Python Has Too Many Package Managers

#43

Post by aborsy »

I use Python but I’m not a professional Python programmer. I use pip and venv, with requirements.txt. It copies Python binary and some of the shared standard libraries from the system, installs the required packages in sites-packages, and it always works fine.

Am I missing anything major by not using conda and Poetry?

Re: Python Has Too Many Package Managers

#44

Post by turndown »

lexicality wrote: post #37
slt2021 wrote: post #23

I see a lot of package managers I never head of, am a happy venv & pip user. One of the key faults of pip is what happens when you decide to remove a dependency. Removing a dependency does not actually remove the sub-dependencies that were brought in by the original dependency, leaving a lot of potential cruft. This is not really an issue if your virtual environments are disposable. Just nuke and recreate venv from s…

I do a lot of maintenance work and every time I've encountered a (complex) project set up in this way that's older than ~6 months, it's bitrotted from breaking changes in the dependencies. The python ecosystem does not stand still and seems quite happy to introduce breaking changes in non-major versions. To my mind, there are 3 ways to make sure your python project of today will work in 2 years time: 1. Have no depen…

Is option 3 exactly what you’re supposed to do? Freezing your dependency graph and/or explicitly denoting what version of the dependency you want are your best bets for avoiding problems like this

Re: Python Has Too Many Package Managers

#46

Post by GenerocUsername »

lexicality wrote: post #37
slt2021 wrote: post #23

I see a lot of package managers I never head of, am a happy venv & pip user. One of the key faults of pip is what happens when you decide to remove a dependency. Removing a dependency does not actually remove the sub-dependencies that were brought in by the original dependency, leaving a lot of potential cruft. This is not really an issue if your virtual environments are disposable. Just nuke and recreate venv from s…

I do a lot of maintenance work and every time I've encountered a (complex) project set up in this way that's older than ~6 months, it's bitrotted from breaking changes in the dependencies. The python ecosystem does not stand still and seems quite happy to introduce breaking changes in non-major versions. To my mind, there are 3 ways to make sure your python project of today will work in 2 years time: 1. Have no depen…

I work in JS and the issues are the same.

It's why NPM creates lockfiles that can freeze the version of direct and indirect deps.

Re: Python Has Too Many Package Managers

#48

Post by rangerelf »

marcosdumay wrote: post #28
theideaofcoffee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just a joke, but for those that don't know that is Perl's motto and even better because there's the venerable, wonderful CPAN [0] which is the de facto package repository for the language. [0] https://www.cpan.org/

It's certainly a joke, because the Python original motto was "there's only one way to do it", and the current one is "there's only one (obvious) way to do it". The Python's motto was created as an obvious reference to the Perl's one, purposefully negating it.

I hate when people reduce that line of the zen in that way; it's actually:

"There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."

That is different from "there's only one way of doing it" in so many ways that it's not even funny.

Re: Python Has Too Many Package Managers

#49

Post by OutOfHere »

slt2021 wrote: post #35
sealedservant wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtual environments are cool, and necessary, but at the same time, they are incredibly limited and I always get frustrated at the lack of features they should have. They are too fragile. Nuking a whole venv when you mess up isn't really efficient. They aren't portable. You need to package up your editable project for an offline system? Too bad, virtual environments use hardcoded paths and symlinks that will be broke…

Dockerfile and requirements.txt is everything you need to know to recreate environment, and this is how apps are usually ran in production. This is how you can create consistent recreatable and testable env and carry it from dev machine to test, staging, CI/CD, and prod environments Never really had an issue with python apps not being portable. Building regular python app? Just use official python docker image. Using…

I dockerize, but using devcontainer.json, and this also plays well with VScode.

Re: Python Has Too Many Package Managers

#50

Post by kapilvt »

lexicality wrote: post #37
slt2021 wrote: post #23

I see a lot of package managers I never head of, am a happy venv & pip user. One of the key faults of pip is what happens when you decide to remove a dependency. Removing a dependency does not actually remove the sub-dependencies that were brought in by the original dependency, leaving a lot of potential cruft. This is not really an issue if your virtual environments are disposable. Just nuke and recreate venv from s…

I do a lot of maintenance work and every time I've encountered a (complex) project set up in this way that's older than ~6 months, it's bitrotted from breaking changes in the dependencies. The python ecosystem does not stand still and seems quite happy to introduce breaking changes in non-major versions. To my mind, there are 3 ways to make sure your python project of today will work in 2 years time: 1. Have no depen…

fwiw, we built an oss plugin for poetry on option #3 when publishing for repeatable installs to automate translation of published wheel metadata from lock file, also supports mono repos.

https://github.com/cloud-custodian/poetry-plugin-freeze

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