It’s something of a “14 competing standards” situation, but uv seems to be the nerd favourite these days.

Python is the only programming language that has forced me to question what the difference is between an egg and a wheel.

You re not stupid, python’s packaging & versionning is PITA. as long as you write it for yourself, you re good. As soon as you want to share it, you have a problem

No, it’s not just you, Python’s tooling is a mess. It’s not necessarily anyone’s fault, but there are a ton of options and a lot of very similarly named things that accomplish different (but sometimes similar) tasks. (pyenv, venv, and virtualenv come to mind.) As someone who considers themselves between beginner and intermediate proficiency in Python, this is my biggest hurdle right now.

Yes it’s terrible. The only hope on the horizon is uv. It’s significantly better than all the other tooling (Poetry, pip, pipenv, etc.) so I think it has a good chance of reducing the options to just Pip or uv at least.

But I fully expect the Python Devs to ignore it, and maybe even make life deliberately difficult for it like they did for static analysers. They have some strange priorities sometimes.

Python developer here. Venv is good, venv is life. Every single project I create starts with

python3 -m venv venv

source venv/bin/activate

pip3 install {everything I need}

pip3 freeze > requirements.txt

Now write code!

Don’t forget to update your requirements.txt using pip3 freeze again anytime you add a new library with pip.

If you installed a lot of packages before starting to develop with virtual environments, some libraries will be in your OS python install and won’t be reflected in pip freeze and won’t get into your venv. This is the root of all evil. First of all, don’t do that. Second, you can force libraries to install into your venv despite them also being in your system by installing like so:

pip3 install --ignore-installed mypackage

If you don’t change between Linux and windows most libraries will just work between systems, but if you have problems on another system, just recreate the whole venv structure

rm -rf venv (…make a new venv, activate it) pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Once you get the hang of this you can make Python behave without a lot of hassle.

This is a case where a strength can also be a weakness.

Python never had much of a central design team. People mostly just scratched their own itch, so you get lots of different tools that do only a small part each, and aren’t necessarily compatible.

The reason you do stuff in a venv is to isolate that environment from other python projects on your system, so one Python project doesn’t break another. I use Docker for similar reasons for a lot of non-Python projects.

A lot of Python projects involve specific versions of libraries, because things break. I’ve had similar issues with non-Python projects. I’m not sure I’d say Python is particularly worse about it.

There are tools in place that can make the sharing of Python projects incredibly easy and portable and consistent, but I only ever see the best maintained projects using them unfortunately.

I agree. Python is my language of choice 80% or so of the time.

But my god, it does packaging badly! Especially if it’s dependent on linking to compiled code!

Why it is like that, I couldn’t tell. The language is older than git, so that might be part of it.

However, you’re installing python libraries from github? I very very rarely have to do that. In what context do you have to do that regularly?

Python is hacky, because it hacks. There’s a bunch of ways you can do anything. You can run it on numerous platforms, or even on web assembly. It’s not maintained centrally. Each “app” you find is just somebodies hack project they’re sharing with you for fun.

How to improve Python packaging, or why fourteen tools are at least twelve too many

Still relevant.

I’ve started using poetry and the experience has improved.

With all the hype surrounding Python it’s easy to forget that it’s a really old language. And, in my opinion, the leadership is a bit of a mess so there hasn’t been any concerted effort on standardizing tooling.

Some unsolicited advice from somebody who is used more refined build environments but is doing a lot of Python these days:

The whole venv thing isn’t too bad once you get the hang of it. But be prepared for people to tell you that you’re using the wrong venv for reasons you’ll never quit understand or likely need to care about. Just use the bundled “python -m venv venv” and you’ll be fine despite other “better” alternatives. It’s bundled so it’s always available to you. And feel free to just drop/recreate your venv whenever you like or need. They’re ephemeral and pretty large once you’ve installed a lot of things.

Use “pipx” to install python applications you want to use as programs rather than libraries. It creates and manages venvs for them so you don’t get library conflicts. Something like “pip-tools” for example (pipx install pip-tools).

Use “pyenv” to manage installed python versions - it’s a bit like “sdkman” for the JVM ecosystem and makes it easy to deal with the “specific versions of python” stuff.

For dependencies for an app - I just create a requirements.txt and “pip install -r requirements.txt” for the most part… Though I should use one of the 80 better ways to do it because they can help with updating versions automatically. Those tools mostly also just spit out a requirements.txt in the end so it’s pretty easy to migrate to them. pip-tools is what my team is moving towards and it seems a reasonable option. YMMV.

This is exactly how I feel about python as well… IMHO, it’s good for some advanced stuff, where bash starts to hit its limits, but I’d never touch it otherwise

Yeah the tooling sucks. The only tooling I’ve liked is Poetry, I never have trouble installing or packaging the apps that use it.