Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Python virtual environments work

snarky.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 293 posts

Re: How Python virtual environments work

#81

Post by okeuro49 »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #71
cstrahan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I find Cargo to be one of the biggest reasons I like Rust so much — maybe even more than anything to do with Rust itself or safe code. I’ll often look for command line tools written in Rust, but not because of Rust fanboyism, but because I know I can just git clone the project and immediately start hacking on a new feature I need or a quick bug fix. In almost every other language I have to jump through one mill…

Yeah, one of Julia's best decisions was taking heavy inspiration from Rust for the package manager. Rust was 100% the first language to get dependency management right.

> Rust was 100% the first language to get dependency management right.

In my experience, Java, Go, PHP, NodeJS have all got similar package management that works.

Re: How Python virtual environments work

#82

Post by phonebucket »

sakex wrote: post #38

It feels like it is one of the reasons experienced devs are ditching Python for production systems. Besides horrendous performance and lousy semantics. The cost of setting up, maintaining the environment and onboarding people is just not worth it.

Are experienced devs really ditching Python for production systems? I wasn't under this impression.

Re: How Python virtual environments work

#83

Post by bagels »

Havoc wrote: post #55

These days I'm just throwing each project into a fresh LXC on a server. All these different languages have their own approach and each then also user/global/multiple versions...it's just not worth figuring out

Same, but with Docker. I don't like conda, was fine with virtualenv, but using docker there's only one python and you can just pip install and not worry about multiple environments.

Re: How Python virtual environments work

#84

Post by winrid »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #67

I'm surprised at the number of people here complaining about venvs in Python. There are lots of warts when it comes to package management in Python, but the built-in venv support has been rock solid in Python 3 for a long time now. Most of the complaints here ironically are from people using a bunch of tooling in lieu of, or as a replacement for vanilla python venvs and then hitting issues associated with those tools…

Because even with --copy it creates all kinds of symlinks, and if you're using pyenv, hard coded paths to the python binary which can break from CI to installation.

If you're using docker then it's a lot easier I guess.

Re: How Python virtual environments work

#85

Post by [deleted] »

sakex wrote: post #38

It feels like it is one of the reasons experienced devs are ditching Python for production systems. Besides horrendous performance and lousy semantics. The cost of setting up, maintaining the environment and onboarding people is just not worth it.

[deleted]

Re: How Python virtual environments work

#87

Post by tmpz22 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #51
lockhouse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it considered best practice not to use brew to install Python for exactly this reason? I’ve always seen it recommended to use pyenv or just download directly from Python.org instead.

Python has always struggled with distribution maintainers that just don’t get it. Python barely survived becoming the default scripting language on Red Hat and other Linux distros which was a major obstruction to the Python 3 transition. If the new cohort of pandas and scikit-learn users had not been such a force of nature we”d be talking today about Python the way we do about Perl. Not installing venv is a serious c…

People just want to get things done. If they can get away with two commands instead of six they will, which is why I think poetry has gotten more adoption.

Re: How Python virtual environments work

#88

Post by buildbot »

pbronez wrote: post #80
buildbot wrote: post #63

I personally hate Conda with a firey passion - it does so much weird magic and ends up breaking things in non obvious ways. Python works best when you keep it really simple. Just a python -m venv per project, a requirements.txt, and you will basically never have issues.

Until you want to use anything with a c extension..

I use it all the time for things with c extensions?

Re: How Python virtual environments work

#89

Post by prds_lost »

birdstheword5 wrote: post #24
Max_Limelihood wrote: post #8

Answer: they don’t (Seriously, I’ve gotten so fed up with Python package management that I just use CondaPkg.jl, which uses Julia’s package manager to take care of Python packages. It is just so much cleaner and easier to use than anything in Python.)

It sounds mean to say it, but it's 100% true. I moved away from using python wherever I can. I've had colleagues struggle for days to install well used packages like pandas and numpy in conda.

Your colleagues should consider skipping conda and stick to using venv. It will make life much easier. Given pandas/numpy is huge in data science, moving away is not much of an option unless you are working on a personal project or already have a dedicated team comfortable with using a different stack. There is also the Docker option which is great but much more involved.

Re: How Python virtual environments work

#90

Post by josteink »

All other languages: use whatever packages you like. You’ll be fine.

Python: we’re going to force all packages from all projects and repos to be installed in a shared global environment, but since nobody actually wants that we will allow you to circumvent that by creating “virtual” environments you can maintain and have to deal with instead. Also remember to activate it before starting your editor or else lulz. And don’t use the same editor instance for multiple projects. Are you crazy???

Also: Python “just works”, unlike all those other silly languages.

Somebody IMO needs to get off their high horse. I can’t believe Python users are defending this nonsense for real. This must be a severe case of Stockholm-syndrome.

Post reply on HN