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Conda: A package management disaster?

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Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#51

Post by jazzyjackson »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #23
wakawaka28 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beginners in Python typically don't need venvs. They can just install a few libraries (or no libraries even) to get started. If you truly need venvs then you're either past the initial learning phase or you're learning how to run Python apps instead of learning Python itself. For some libraries, it is not acceptable to stash the dependencies for every single toy app you use. I don't know how much space TensorFlow or…

i remember reading somewhere (on twitter iirc) an amateur sex survey statistician who decided she needed to use python to analyze her dataset, being guided toward setting up venvs pretty early on by her programmer friends and getting extremely frustrated.

Was it aella? I don't know of any other sex survey statisticians so I'm assuming you mean aella. She has a pretty funny thread here but no mention of venvs: (non-musk-link https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/1522633160483385345)

  Every google for help I do is useless. Each page is full of terms I don't understand at *all*. They're like "Oh solving that error is simple, just take the library and shove it into the jenga package loader so you can execute the lab function with a pasta variation".
She probably would have been better off being pointed towards jupyter, but that's neither here nor there

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#52

Post by BrenBarn »

Nothing in the "article" seems to support the title. A lot of it is just about Python packaging in general, or about problems when mixing conda- and pip-installed packages.

In my experience conda is enormously superior to the standard Python packaging tools.

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#53

Post by jszymborski »

alsodumb wrote: post #4

As someone with admittedly no formal CS education, I've been using conda for all of my grad school and never managed to break it. I create a virtual environment for every project. I install almost all packages with pip, except for any binaries or CUDA related things from conda. I always exported the conda yaml file and managed to reproduce the code/environment including the Python version. I've seen a lot of posts ov…

God forbid you should require conda-forge and more than three packages lest the dependency resolver take longer than the heat death of the planet to complete.

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#54

Post by jszymborski »

j0057 wrote: post #46

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 requirement…

pip + venv or just using Poetry usually is 100% headache-free for me. Conda, however, is usually a great way to ensure I have an awful time.

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#55

Post by cdavid »

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…

A lot of path dependency, but essentially

  1. A good python solution needs to support native extensions. Few other languages solve this well, especially across unix + windows.
  2. Python itself does not have package manager included.
I am not sure solving 2 alone is enough, because it will be hard to fix 1 then. And ofc 2 would needs to have solution for older python versions.

My guess is that we're stuck in a local maximum for a while, with uv looking like a decent contender.

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#56

Post by f1shy »

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…

>> One thing which I think messed this up from the beginning was applying the Unix philosophy with several/many individual tools as opposed to one cohesive system

Well, Unix IS the cohesive system..

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#57

Post by turboponyy »

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.

The thing is, Nix is not Yet Another Tool, it is the tool.

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#58

Post by Balinares »

BrenBarn wrote: post #52

Nothing in the "article" seems to support the title. A lot of it is just about Python packaging in general, or about problems when mixing conda- and pip-installed packages. In my experience conda is enormously superior to the standard Python packaging tools.

If we're doing anecdotal evidence, then mine is that conda is by far the worst of the main Python packaging solutions in use. The absurd slowness and incompatibility with the entire rest of the Python world are only the visible tip of that iceberg. To the best of my ability to tell, conda largely exists to make up for endemic deficiencies in Windows software distribution toolchains (not Python specific) and sadly it's not even good at that either.

Mind you, glad it works for you. Warms my grey heart to know there's some balance in this universe. :)

Re: Conda: A package management disaster?

#60

Post by ashoeafoot »

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…

or lua rocks
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