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Conda: A package management disaster?

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Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#41

Post by emptiestplace »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #27
duped wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with conda is that its fine if you're the original author of whatever you're using it for and never share it with anyone else. But as a professional I usually have to pull in someone else's work and make it function on a completely different machine/environment. I've only had negative experiences with conda for that reason. IME the hard job of package management is not getting software to work in one lo…

Poetry is pretty slow. I think `uv` will ultimately displace it on that basis alone.

I actually can't believe how fast `uv` is.

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#43

Post by The_Colonel »

reactordev wrote: post #40
pmarreck wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix solves it for me. Takes a bit more effort upfront, but the payoff is "Python dependency determinism," which is pretty much unachievable in any other way, so...

The answer is not Yet Another Tool In The Chain. Python community itself needs to address this. Because if they don’t then you’ll have requirements.txt, setuptools, pyproject, pip, pipx, pipenv, pyenv, venv, nix.

Agreed. Often there's a quite tight coupling between the core platform devs and package management - node.js has its npm, rust cargo, go has one as well and for the most part it seems to have worked out fine for them. Java and .NET (and I think PHP) are different in the sense that the package management systems have no relation to the platform developers, but industry standards (maven, gradle, NuGET, Composer) still appeared and are widely accepted.

But with Python it seems completely fractured - everyone tries to solve it their own way, with nothing becoming a truly widely used solution. More involvement from the Python project could make a difference. From my perspective, this mess is currently Python's biggest problem and should be prioritized accordingly.

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#44

Post by hobofan »

The_Colonel wrote: post #32

It's rare to see something as systematically broken as Python package/dependencies ecosystem. What I don't understand - what makes this so difficult to solve in Python? It seems that many other platforms solved this a long time ago - maven 2.0 was released almost 20 years ago. While it wasn't / isn't by no means perfect, its fundamentals were decent already back then. One thing which I think messed this up from the b…

> What I don't understand - what makes this so difficult to solve in Python?

I think there are many answers to this, and there are many factors contributing to it, but if I had to pick one: The setup.py file. It needs to be executed to determine the dependencies of a project. Since it's a script, that allows any maintainer of any package you are using to do arbitrarily complex/dumb stuff in it like e.g. conditionally adding dependencies based on host system specific environment markers, or introduce assumptions on the environment it is being installed to. That makes trying to achieve all the things you'f want from a modern package manager so much harder.

This also means that the problem isn't just concentrated in 1-2 central package management projects, but scattered throughout the ecosystem (and some of the worst offenders are some of Python's most popular sub-ecosystems).

There is some light with the introduction of the pyproject.toml, and now uv as a tool taking advantage of it.

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#46

Post by j0057 »

This seems to be an aggregation of some posts on python-list. Basically, extra-random opinions.

I'll offer mine: I won't say that Python packaging is generally excellent, but it's gotten much better over the years. The pyproject.toml is a godsend, there's the venv module built-in to Python, pip will by default no longer install package outside of a venv. Dependency groups are being added, meaning that the requirements.txt files can also be specified in the project.toml. Documentation is pretty good, especially if you avoid blog posts from 5+ years ago.

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#47

Post by 331c8c71 »

reactordev wrote: post #40
pmarreck wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix solves it for me. Takes a bit more effort upfront, but the payoff is "Python dependency determinism," which is pretty much unachievable in any other way, so...

The answer is not Yet Another Tool In The Chain. Python community itself needs to address this. Because if they don’t then you’ll have requirements.txt, setuptools, pyproject, pip, pipx, pipenv, pyenv, venv, nix.

Nix is cross-language though. So it will be useful even if the Python mess is cleaned up a bit.

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#48

Post by aja12 »

alkh wrote: post #14
duped wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with conda is that its fine if you're the original author of whatever you're using it for and never share it with anyone else. But as a professional I usually have to pull in someone else's work and make it function on a completely different machine/environment. I've only had negative experiences with conda for that reason. IME the hard job of package management is not getting software to work in one lo…

+1. On top of that, even with the new resolver it still takes ages to resolve a dependency for me, so somethimes I end up just using pip directly. Not sure if I am doing something wrong(mb you have to manually tweak something in the configs?) but it's pretty common for me to experience this

Like sibling comments, after using poetry for years (and pipx for tools), I tried uv a few months ago

I was so amazed of the speed, I moved all my projects to uv and have not yet looked back.

uv replaces all of pip, pipx and poetry for me, I does not do more than these tools, but it does it right and fast.

If you're at liberty to try uv, you should try it someday, you might like it. (nothing wrong with staying with poetry or pyenv though, they get the job done)

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#49

Post by LarsDu88 »

akdor1154 wrote: post #31
maurosilber wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same experience. But you should try pixi, which is to conda what uv is to pip.

Isn't uv to conda what uv is to pip?

`uv` is not a drop-in replacement for `conda` in the sense that `conda` also handles non-python dependencies, has its own distinct api server for packages, and has its own packaging yaml standard.

`pixi` basically covers `conda` while using the same solver as `uv` and is written in Rust like `uv`.

Now is it a good idea to have python's package management tool handle non-python packages? I think that's debateable. I personally am in favor of a world where `uv` is simply the final python package management solution.

Wrote an article on it here: https://dublog.net/blog/so-many-python-package-managers/

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#50

Post by jyap »

drawnwren wrote: post #37
pmarreck wrote: post #35

I feel like a major selling point of Nix is "solving the Python dependency-hell problem" (as well as that of pretty much every other stack) I've seen so many issues with different Python venvs from different Python project directories stepping on each others' dependencies somehow (probably because there are some global ones) that the fact that I can now just stick a basic and barely-modified-per-project Python flake.…

Do you have a publicly available copy of your flake?

I started using Devenv which utilizes Nix. You might want to check that out.

https://devenv.sh/

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