It’s a really bold claim. Every time a new package manager and/or dependency resolver comes around, we have the exact same headline
I think of this literally every time I have any issue
It is a bold claim, but based on their success with ruff, I’m optimistic that it might pan out.
I do enjoy ruff a lot, but only time will tell
There are 14 competing standards…
have there been a lot of them?
pipx, poetry, pipsi, fades, pae, pactivate, pyenv, virtualenv, pipenv
Let’s hope this next one will be the true standard.
pyenv, virtualenv, pipenv, aren’t package managers… they are virtual environment managers / creators and use pip for package management.
We’re using poetry and it solves our problems. I’ll have to look into uv, but I don’t feel in any rush to switch away from poetry.
I’ve been mostly a poetry guy but have tested out uv a bit lately. Two main advantages I see are being able to install Python (I relied on pyenv before) and it’s waaay faster at solving/installing dependencies.
Yeah, it certainly looks nice, but my problems are:
- everything runs in a docker container locally, so I don’t think the caching is going to be a huge win
- we have a half-dozen teams and a dozen repositories or so, across three time zones, so big changes require a fair amount of effort
- we just got through porting to poetry to split into dependency groups, and going back to not having that is a tough sell
So for me, it needs to at least have feature parity w/ poetry to seriously consider.
uv is still faster with a cold cache
and uv does have dep groups
about the second problem, there’s an issue open on writing a migration guide, but migrating manually is not too difficult.
I’m not really worried about the migration work, from what I can tell it’s basically just moving a few things around. I’m more worried about losing features the team likes largely for performance reasons.
Our primary use cases are:
- dev tools - standardize versions of tools like black, pylint, etc; not necessary if we move to
ruff, we’ll just standardize on a version of that (like we do withpoetrytoday) - tests - extra deps for CI/CD for things like coverage reports
I like the syntax
poetryhas, but I’d be willing to use something else, like in PEP 735.One thing we also need is a way to define additional package repos since we use an internal repo. I didn’t see that called out in the PEP, and I haven’t looked at
uvenough to know what their plan is, but this issue seems to be intended to fix it. We specify a specific repo for a handful of packages in each project, and we need that to work as well.I’m currently looking to use
ruffto replace some of our dev tools, and I’ll look back atuvin another release or two to see what the progress is on our blockers.- dev tools - standardize versions of tools like black, pylint, etc; not necessary if we move to
You should be using dockers cache mounts
https://docs.docker.com/build/cache/optimize/#use-cache-mounts
Good call. We have some other tech debt related to our docker usage, so I’ll add this to the list.
Yet another python packager
...............insane that such a popular language still doesn’t have this basic problem solved.Yeah but this one is actually good. So hopefully it will displace all the others.
pipis a perfectly usable package manager and is included in most python distributions now. Is it perfect? No, but it is good enough for every team I have been on.@CodeMonkey @ertai No it is not perfectly usable for all people, all projects, all situations. uv definitely gets much closer to that.
it’s usable, yet it doesn’t attempt to solve a a third of the problems uv, poetry, and pdm address.
it’s also not hard to end up with a broken env with pip.
Except that it’s slower than uv and therefore strictly worse for build processes
Putting aside the speed uv has a bunch of features that usually require 2-4 separate tools. These tools are very popular but not very well liked. The fact these tools are so popular proves that pip is not sufficient for many use cases. Other languages have a single tool (e.g. cargo) that are very well liked.
I use poetry and it works really well. I would consider it solved but that doesn’t mean there isn’t the possibility of a better solution.
Glad I use arch btw, pacman manages my python packages so I don’t have to deal with all this mess.
In my field we rely on conda and I hate it every day.
Why, out of curiosity?
We do geodata science and rely on some pretty specific C++ libraries that are only distributed via conda. While on unix-based systems it’s possible to get some of them from other channels or even building them from source, we mostly have Windows machines in production where we are not that flexible. Docker is unfortunately no solution due to security concerns.
If you are asking why I hate it: It’s bloated, uses more space than needed and it’s rare I can reproduce an environment from the environment file without running into errors. Using it feels unintuitive, I still google command after years. It was very slow until recently, when the libmamba solver was finally integrated. Last but not least licensing is a pain in the ass.
I share the same frustration trying to replicate an environment. I’m glad I can avoid it these days, the community needs a way out of the conda lock-in.
Interesting. We use conda via micromamba for my own project, as it makes the install for end-users much easier when they can just run a shell script, to install python, cuda, and all the dependencies needed.
I’ve been using micromamba/mamba and not had solving issues like I did with conda. Im glad conda integrated libmamba.
Question: why were docker containers deemed security risks?
If Windows, it requires a VM and currently infosec is not keen on virtualization in the hands of users.
I’m no expert, but isn’t running in a VM strictly better than running on raw metal from a security perspective? It’s generally more locked down, and breaking out of the virtualization layer requires a separate security breach from gaining access to the running container.
I would think so as well. Possibly it’s because a local VM is harder for them to monitor.
Yes, mamba is a huge improvement. Regarding docker I can’t really tell you as I’m not an infrastructure guy.
Just tell me how uv is financed …
Got toml file support yet? Then I’m happy to talk :)
Looks like it has basic support:
required-python = "..."dependencies = [ ... ]
Once it gets dependency groups, I’ll try it out. I’m currently using
poetry, which works, but I’m always interested in better perf.it already has dep groups; e.g.
uv add --optional staging pytestthen
uv sync --extra stagingto install / uninstall packages accordingly.
They have a
--devshorthand for dev dependencies, but it seems the dependency group PEP is not final, so there isn’t a standardized way of doing this yet.Private PyPI too?
We’re coming from poetry but it’s slow and needs its own .venv, so a UV binary would be very nice.
yeah, it works with private pypi
I don’t find it in the docs…how to set my PAT?
Oh cool, I’ll definitely look into that.
And honestly, the one I need more is a
testgroup for CI, for things like coverage reporting and whatnot. If I can get that and if having multiple package indexes works properly (i.e. it can check my private repo first, and then pypi), I can probably port our projects to uv, at which point it’s an internal discussion instead of a technical one.
they do, just use project management commands like
uv+ {add,remove,sync,lock,run}
