7 ms·

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.

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.

ThibWeb 11mo ago
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
- bognition 11mo ago
  Honestly, I was skeptical when I learned about uv. I thought, just Python needs, another dependency manager… this was after fighting with pip, venv, venvwrapper, and poetry for years. Then I gave it a try and it just worked! It’s so much better that I immediately moved all my Python projects to it.
  - zahlman 11mo ago
    > I thought, just Python needs, another dependency manager… this was after fighting with pip, venv, venvwrapper, and poetry for years. Pip, venv and virtualenvwrapper (people still use this?) are not meaningfully "dependency managers". A venv is just a place to put things, and pip does only basic tracking and tries to maintain a consistent environment. It isn't trying to help you figure out what dependencies you need, create new environments from scratch, update pyproject.toml.... Pip's core capability is the actual installation of packages, and uv does a far better job of that part, using smarter caching, hard links to share files, parallelized pre-compilation of .pyc files, etc. Basically it's designed from the ground up with the intention to make lots of environments and expect starting a new one to be cheap. Poetry, as far as I was able to determine, does it basically the same way as pip.
    - sgarland 11mo ago
      I actually did use virtualenvwrapper quite a bit until uv. I had built up various shell aliases and functions, so it was fairly painless to create and manage venvs. uv just means that I don’t have to think about that part now.
- simonw 11mo ago
  uv first came out 15th February 2024 so it's a year and a half old now. Still pretty impressive for it to get adoption this fast though.
- WD-42 11mo ago
  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.
  - greenavocado 11mo ago
    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.
  - kstrauser 11mo ago
    Yep. Poetry was such a delightful upgrade from pipenv, which we’d tested as an upgrade from bare pip, which didn’t have a dependency resolver at the time. If someone’s already fully bought in on poetry, that’d be the one case where I could plausibly imagine them wanting to leave well enough alone. For everyone else, just try uv and don’t look back.
- rtpg 11mo ago
  uv having a good pip compatibility layer probably helped a lot, because you could try things out that way and see what fit, so to speak. It's probably worth mentioning that Astral (The team behind uv/etc) has a team filled with people with a history of making very good CLI tooling. They probably have a very good sense for what matters in this stuff, and are thus avoiding a lot of pain. Motivation is not enough, there's also a skill factor. And being multiple people working on it "full time"-ish means you can get so much done, especially before the backwards compat issues really start falling into place
- perrygeo 11mo ago
  The pace of uv adoption is insanely fast. It's directly related to how bad the previous Python tools were/are. Even to seasoned veterans set in their ways - they still know a better solution when they see it.
- scuff3d 11mo ago
  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.
- lukeschlather 11mo ago
  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.
  - skylurk 11mo ago
    It's a (better IMO) replacement for poetry, but not drop-in. Additionally it is a drop-in replacement for venv and pip-tools.
andy99 11mo ago
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.
- morshu9001 11mo ago
  uv is comparable to npm. All your deps get auto tracked in a file. There are other things that do this, but pip isn't one of them, and I vaguely remember the others being less convenient. The speed usually doesn't matter, but one time I did have to use it to auto figure out compatible deps in a preexisting project because the pip equivalent with backtracking was taking forever with CPU pegged at 100.
- cgearhart 11mo ago
  I’ve been trying uv lately to replace my normal workflow of selecting a python with pyenv for the shell, then making a venv, then installing a bunch of default packages (pandas, Jupyter, etc). So far the only benefit is that I can use just the one tool for what used to take 3 (pyenv, venv, pip). I don’t _hate_ it…but it really isn’t much of an improvement.
- gre 11mo ago
  You've never waited 10 minutes for conda to solve your environment and then say it's unsolvable?
  - andy99 11mo ago
    I have, but it takes me back many years to some obscure situations I’ve been in. For my day to day, I can’t think of the last time I’ve encountered it, it’s been years, and I regularly am setting up new environments. That’s why I’m curious about the workflows where it matters.
anitil 11mo ago
For me the most convincing argument was that it took ~3 minutes to go from 'I wonder if I should give this thing a try' to 'oh it .... it worked!?'
- saghm 11mo ago
  As someone who also hasn't really used any of the past 8 years or so of Python dependency management, it's nice that it seems to support using arbitrary other tooling as well. At some point recently I wanted to run something that happened to use pdm, which I hadn't even heard of, but I was able to invoke it with `uv tool run pdm` and not have to learn anything about how to set it up manually.
  - om8 11mo ago
    FYI you can run just `uvx pdm`
    - saghm 11mo ago
      Interesting! I honestly didn't even know that this shorthand existed
- tclancy 11mo ago
  Yeah, been doing this for over twenty years and finally got a chance to start playing with it a few months back and was confused at how I got that far that fast.
- mnky9800n 11mo ago
  This is how I explain it to the stragglers. Just try it because you will suddenly in about 1 to 3 minutes not know how to go back. Haha.
ziml77 11mo ago
It really is! I switched to using uv just 2 weeks ago. Previously I had been dealing with maintaining a ton of batch jobs that used: global packages (yes, sudo pip install), manually managed virtualenvs, and docker containers. uv beats all of them easily. Automatically handling the virtualenv means running a project that uses uv feels as easy as invoking the system Python is.
- Balinares 11mo ago
  I just wish uv made it more straightforward to have arbitrary purpose-specific virtual environments, e.g. for building the package, for running the test suite, for dev tooling (PuDB ), etc. That's one thing pixi does better, I think.
atoav 11mo ago
Started converting every repo over to uv. I had some weird and hard to deal with dependencies before. Every single one was easier to solve than before. It just works and is blazingly fast. Absolute no-brainer.
walkabout 11mo ago
Is this like when everyone on here had already been saying Yarn was a no-brainer replacement for npm, having totally obsoleted it, for like two-plus years, but it was still lacking safety/sanity checks, missing features, and broke in bizarre ways on lots of packages in-the-wild? Or is the superior replacement actually up to the job this time?
- kstrauser 11mo ago
  I’m certain there’s going to be so bizarre edge case where pip is fine and uv isn’t. It’s inevitable. However, in every situation where I’ve used it, pip is better than pip or poetry or any other package manager I’ve ever used. I just found out they’re still making pipenv. Yes, if you’re using pipenv, I’m confident that uv will be a better experience in every way, except maybe “I like using pipenv so I can take long coffee breaks every time I run it”.
  - walkabout 11mo ago
    Yeah, I’m just skeptical because I was at an agency in the heat of yarn-mania, waaaay after people online were proclaiming npm dead and pointless, and it went poorly enough that we developed a ha-ha-only-serious joke that you knew a project was properly in-development when someone had lost a half-day debugging some really weird error only to find that “npm install” instantly fixed it, and then switched the started-in-yarn codebase over to npm.
    - kstrauser 11mo ago
      I could see that being traumatizing, but this really isn’t like that. Pip and uv and poetry and the rest don’t fundamentally change how a package is installed into a Python virtualenv. If `uv add foo` works, you could use the equivalent in any of those other tools and get basically the same result. You don’t have to know or care which tool is installing your project because that’s all invisible from inside the code you write.
    - philipallstar 11mo ago
      The Javascript tool wars were a lot more emotional and cargo-culty than anything in the Python space I can think of.
hk1337 11mo ago
It’s a little too fast, I’m having trouble believing it’s actually doing anything sometimes.
- hyperbovine 11mo ago
  uv is so over-the-top fast compared to what we're used to that I would argue it's actually bad for the language. Suddenly it dawns on you that by far the most capable and performant package manager (and linter) (and code formatter) (and type checker) for Python is in fact not written in Python. Leaves an odd taste. Makes you wonder what else ought not be written in Python ... or why anything should be written in Python. Here be dragons ...
  - arcanemachiner 11mo ago
    Try not to cut yourself while grinding that axe. Python may not be the fastest language, but it's easy to learn, compilation times aren't an issue, you'll never have to fight the borrow checker, etc. Every language has its warts.
  - tyg13 11mo ago
    IMO, Python should only be used for what it was intended for: as a scripting language. I tend to use it as a kind of middle ground between shell scripting and compiled languages like Rust or C. It's a truly phenomenal language for gluing together random libraries and data formats, and whenever I have some one-off task where I need to request some data from some REST API, build a mapping from the response, categorize it, write the results as JSON, then push some result to another API -- I reach for Python. But as soon as I have any suspicion that the task is going to perform any non-trivial computation, or when I notice the structure of the program starts to grow beyond a couple of files, that's when Python no longer feels suitable to the task.
    - Grimblewald 11mo ago
      Also great for rapid prototyping, but one needs to be real with oneself, it is a prototype.
WhyNotHugo 11mo ago
uv is weird. It's like 5 entirely different tools mashed and entangled into one program. Last I tried it, it insisted on downloading a dynamically linked Python and installing that. This obviously doesn't work, you can't distribute dynamically linked binaries for Linux and expect them to work on any distribution (I keep seeing this pattern and I guess it's because this typically works on macOS?). Moreover my distribution already has a package manager which can install Python. I get that some absolute niche cases might need this functionality, but that should most definitely be a separate tool. The problem isn't just that the functionality is in the same binary, but also that it can get triggered when you're using another of its functionalities. I wish this had been made into actual separate tools, where the useful ones can be adopted and the others ignored. And, most important, where the ecosystem can iterate on a single tool. Having "one tool that does 5 things" makes it really hard to iterate on a new tools that does only one of those things in a better way. It's pretty disappointing to see the Python ecosystem move in this direction.
- Balinares 11mo ago
  Your distro's package manager cannot install arbitrary versions of Python such as might be required by a specific Python project and it cannot install anything at all for individual users without root access. These are two different tools that serve two different purposes.
pjmlp 11mo ago
I never got why. I use Python since version 1.6, mainly for OS scripting, because I rather use something with JIT/AOT in the box for application software. Still, having a little setup script to change environment variables for PYTHONPATH, PATH and a few other things, always did the trick. Never got to spend hours tracking down problems caused by the multiple solutions that are supposed to solve Python's problems.

ThibWeb 11mo ago

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

bognition 11mo ago
Honestly, I was skeptical when I learned about uv. I thought, just Python needs, another dependency manager… this was after fighting with pip, venv, venvwrapper, and poetry for years. Then I gave it a try and it just worked! It’s so much better that I immediately moved all my Python projects to it.
- zahlman 11mo ago
  > I thought, just Python needs, another dependency manager… this was after fighting with pip, venv, venvwrapper, and poetry for years. Pip, venv and virtualenvwrapper (people still use this?) are not meaningfully "dependency managers". A venv is just a place to put things, and pip does only basic tracking and tries to maintain a consistent environment. It isn't trying to help you figure out what dependencies you need, create new environments from scratch, update pyproject.toml.... Pip's core capability is the actual installation of packages, and uv does a far better job of that part, using smarter caching, hard links to share files, parallelized pre-compilation of .pyc files, etc. Basically it's designed from the ground up with the intention to make lots of environments and expect starting a new one to be cheap. Poetry, as far as I was able to determine, does it basically the same way as pip.
  - sgarland 11mo ago
    I actually did use virtualenvwrapper quite a bit until uv. I had built up various shell aliases and functions, so it was fairly painless to create and manage venvs. uv just means that I don’t have to think about that part now.
simonw 11mo ago
uv first came out 15th February 2024 so it's a year and a half old now. Still pretty impressive for it to get adoption this fast though.
WD-42 11mo ago
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.
- greenavocado 11mo ago
  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.
- kstrauser 11mo ago
  Yep. Poetry was such a delightful upgrade from pipenv, which we’d tested as an upgrade from bare pip, which didn’t have a dependency resolver at the time. If someone’s already fully bought in on poetry, that’d be the one case where I could plausibly imagine them wanting to leave well enough alone. For everyone else, just try uv and don’t look back.
rtpg 11mo ago
uv having a good pip compatibility layer probably helped a lot, because you could try things out that way and see what fit, so to speak. It's probably worth mentioning that Astral (The team behind uv/etc) has a team filled with people with a history of making very good CLI tooling. They probably have a very good sense for what matters in this stuff, and are thus avoiding a lot of pain. Motivation is not enough, there's also a skill factor. And being multiple people working on it "full time"-ish means you can get so much done, especially before the backwards compat issues really start falling into place
perrygeo 11mo ago
The pace of uv adoption is insanely fast. It's directly related to how bad the previous Python tools were/are. Even to seasoned veterans set in their ways - they still know a better solution when they see it.
scuff3d 11mo ago
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.
lukeschlather 11mo ago
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.
- skylurk 11mo ago
  It's a (better IMO) replacement for poetry, but not drop-in. Additionally it is a drop-in replacement for venv and pip-tools.

andy99 11mo ago

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.

morshu9001 11mo ago
uv is comparable to npm. All your deps get auto tracked in a file. There are other things that do this, but pip isn't one of them, and I vaguely remember the others being less convenient. The speed usually doesn't matter, but one time I did have to use it to auto figure out compatible deps in a preexisting project because the pip equivalent with backtracking was taking forever with CPU pegged at 100.
cgearhart 11mo ago
I’ve been trying uv lately to replace my normal workflow of selecting a python with pyenv for the shell, then making a venv, then installing a bunch of default packages (pandas, Jupyter, etc). So far the only benefit is that I can use just the one tool for what used to take 3 (pyenv, venv, pip). I don’t _hate_ it…but it really isn’t much of an improvement.
gre 11mo ago
You've never waited 10 minutes for conda to solve your environment and then say it's unsolvable?
- andy99 11mo ago
  I have, but it takes me back many years to some obscure situations I’ve been in. For my day to day, I can’t think of the last time I’ve encountered it, it’s been years, and I regularly am setting up new environments. That’s why I’m curious about the workflows where it matters.

anitil 11mo ago

For me the most convincing argument was that it took ~3 minutes to go from 'I wonder if I should give this thing a try' to 'oh it .... it worked!?'

saghm 11mo ago
As someone who also hasn't really used any of the past 8 years or so of Python dependency management, it's nice that it seems to support using arbitrary other tooling as well. At some point recently I wanted to run something that happened to use pdm, which I hadn't even heard of, but I was able to invoke it with `uv tool run pdm` and not have to learn anything about how to set it up manually.
- om8 11mo ago
  FYI you can run just `uvx pdm`
  - saghm 11mo ago
    Interesting! I honestly didn't even know that this shorthand existed
tclancy 11mo ago
Yeah, been doing this for over twenty years and finally got a chance to start playing with it a few months back and was confused at how I got that far that fast.
mnky9800n 11mo ago
This is how I explain it to the stragglers. Just try it because you will suddenly in about 1 to 3 minutes not know how to go back. Haha.

ziml77 11mo ago

It really is! I switched to using uv just 2 weeks ago. Previously I had been dealing with maintaining a ton of batch jobs that used: global packages (yes, sudo pip install), manually managed virtualenvs, and docker containers. uv beats all of them easily. Automatically handling the virtualenv means running a project that uses uv feels as easy as invoking the system Python is.

Balinares 11mo ago
I just wish uv made it more straightforward to have arbitrary purpose-specific virtual environments, e.g. for building the package, for running the test suite, for dev tooling (PuDB ), etc. That's one thing pixi does better, I think.

atoav 11mo ago

Started converting every repo over to uv. I had some weird and hard to deal with dependencies before. Every single one was easier to solve than before. It just works and is blazingly fast. Absolute no-brainer.

walkabout 11mo ago

Is this like when everyone on here had already been saying Yarn was a no-brainer replacement for npm, having totally obsoleted it, for like two-plus years, but it was still lacking safety/sanity checks, missing features, and broke in bizarre ways on lots of packages in-the-wild? Or is the superior replacement actually up to the job this time?

kstrauser 11mo ago
I’m certain there’s going to be so bizarre edge case where pip is fine and uv isn’t. It’s inevitable. However, in every situation where I’ve used it, pip is better than pip or poetry or any other package manager I’ve ever used. I just found out they’re still making pipenv. Yes, if you’re using pipenv, I’m confident that uv will be a better experience in every way, except maybe “I like using pipenv so I can take long coffee breaks every time I run it”.
- walkabout 11mo ago
  Yeah, I’m just skeptical because I was at an agency in the heat of yarn-mania, waaaay after people online were proclaiming npm dead and pointless, and it went poorly enough that we developed a ha-ha-only-serious joke that you knew a project was properly in-development when someone had lost a half-day debugging some really weird error only to find that “npm install” instantly fixed it, and then switched the started-in-yarn codebase over to npm.
  - kstrauser 11mo ago
    I could see that being traumatizing, but this really isn’t like that. Pip and uv and poetry and the rest don’t fundamentally change how a package is installed into a Python virtualenv. If `uv add foo` works, you could use the equivalent in any of those other tools and get basically the same result. You don’t have to know or care which tool is installing your project because that’s all invisible from inside the code you write.
  - philipallstar 11mo ago
    The Javascript tool wars were a lot more emotional and cargo-culty than anything in the Python space I can think of.

hk1337 11mo ago

It’s a little too fast, I’m having trouble believing it’s actually doing anything sometimes.

hyperbovine 11mo ago
uv is so over-the-top fast compared to what we're used to that I would argue it's actually bad for the language. Suddenly it dawns on you that by far the most capable and performant package manager (and linter) (and code formatter) (and type checker) for Python is in fact not written in Python. Leaves an odd taste. Makes you wonder what else ought not be written in Python ... or why anything should be written in Python. Here be dragons ...
- arcanemachiner 11mo ago
  Try not to cut yourself while grinding that axe. Python may not be the fastest language, but it's easy to learn, compilation times aren't an issue, you'll never have to fight the borrow checker, etc. Every language has its warts.
- tyg13 11mo ago
  IMO, Python should only be used for what it was intended for: as a scripting language. I tend to use it as a kind of middle ground between shell scripting and compiled languages like Rust or C. It's a truly phenomenal language for gluing together random libraries and data formats, and whenever I have some one-off task where I need to request some data from some REST API, build a mapping from the response, categorize it, write the results as JSON, then push some result to another API -- I reach for Python. But as soon as I have any suspicion that the task is going to perform any non-trivial computation, or when I notice the structure of the program starts to grow beyond a couple of files, that's when Python no longer feels suitable to the task.
  - Grimblewald 11mo ago
    Also great for rapid prototyping, but one needs to be real with oneself, it is a prototype.

WhyNotHugo 11mo ago

uv is weird. It's like 5 entirely different tools mashed and entangled into one program. Last I tried it, it insisted on downloading a dynamically linked Python and installing that. This obviously doesn't work, you can't distribute dynamically linked binaries for Linux and expect them to work on any distribution (I keep seeing this pattern and I guess it's because this typically works on macOS?). Moreover my distribution already has a package manager which can install Python. I get that some absolute niche cases might need this functionality, but that should most definitely be a separate tool. The problem isn't just that the functionality is in the same binary, but also that it can get triggered when you're using another of its functionalities. I wish this had been made into actual separate tools, where the useful ones can be adopted and the others ignored. And, most important, where the ecosystem can iterate on a single tool. Having "one tool that does 5 things" makes it really hard to iterate on a new tools that does only one of those things in a better way. It's pretty disappointing to see the Python ecosystem move in this direction.

Balinares 11mo ago
Your distro's package manager cannot install arbitrary versions of Python such as might be required by a specific Python project and it cannot install anything at all for individual users without root access. These are two different tools that serve two different purposes.

pjmlp 11mo ago

I never got why. I use Python since version 1.6, mainly for OS scripting, because I rather use something with JIT/AOT in the box for application software. Still, having a little setup script to change environment variables for PYTHONPATH, PATH and a few other things, always did the trick. Never got to spend hours tracking down problems caused by the multiple solutions that are supposed to solve Python's problems.