Why would someone choose to use a third party library when the first party solution[0] is more than adequate in the first place?
I prefer poetry though, since the consensus seems to be coming together on pyproject.toml rather than individual files like Pipfile. A lot of tools have already started supporting the toml file for their config, or have PRs pending.
Why on earth would anyone need all this to manage packages for their projects?
Are there any other programming languages whose package-management comes close to this level of intricacy and complexity?
“This project needs package X”
I mean how hard can that be to get right in a self-contained environment?
This whole story is just madness coupled deep denial and Stockholm-syndrome.
>I mean how hard can that be to get right in a self-contained environment?
Okay, I’ll bite.
What version of package X does it need?
Is there a specific version that’s been tested with this project and is known working?
Are there specific versions of its dependencies that have been tested and are known working?
Is it needed at runtime or only at build-time?
What repository can it be found in? PyPI is not the only Python repository; private repos are common.
And as a bonus cherry on top: how easy is it to make sure you have all the project’s dependencies installed in the venv for that project, and that you don’t have packages you’re not keeping track of? This is a UX thing, but developers are human and it matters.
> Why on earth would anyone need all this to manage packages for their projects?
> Are there any other programming languages whose package-management comes close to this level of intricacy and complexity?
> “This project needs package X”
> I mean how hard can that be to get right in a self-contained environment?
Packages often have subdependencies and their requirements at times may conflict. If you are very specific in the versions you want, it is more likely to cause issues in dependency resolution.
I would hardly call a dev's machine a "self-contained environment". Most developers I know work in a number of repos with varying requirements, and polluting their system libraries and packages with each project's requirements quickly pollutes the system and can lead to issues.
But a software project is.
Only that software project needs those packages.
I think many do. Ruby, Node, Erlang/Elixir, Java, Go, Rust, dotnet, C... I’m having trouble thinking of a modern language that doesn’t have such package management mechanisms.
For many people doing anything more than writing one-off scripts, and especially for anyone who collaborates with others or shares their code, package management is so much more than just “this project needs package X”.
My criticism isn’t about having a package-management story.
It’s about having a terrible and complex one.
If you think any of the listed examples have “simple” package management tools, I question how deeply you have used any of them. NPM has ~60 commands and hundreds of subcommands each with multiple option flags, and probably hundreds more config options. Gem/Bundle is similar, etc.
If anything, Python is trying to catch up in how complex it’s package managers can be.
For most other language-provided package-managers the software project you’re working on is the env, so you don’t need to construct or manage a venv at all.
So my point still stands.
I can't think of many Python packages that have the same issues, and Python code isn't sent to and running on a user's browser.
Am I wrong or is there a reason that a locking mechanism (other than git) is helpful in Python?
I don't use Python/pip much but as for npm: the problem is when your dependencies, direct or indirect (dependencies of dependencies), aren't "exact". You have something like "~1.2.3" or "^1.2.3". If every developer followed Semvar perfectly, never shipped regressions or new bugs when fixing a bug, and was always able to identify every breaking change then life would be perfect.
That is, however, not the world we live in. So a "lock" file respects your "fuzzy" versions ^/~ when you first run the npm install and then subsequent runs will install using the exact versions you downloaded the first time. This helps solve the "works me me"/"work on my machine" problems. The idea being if you can run it locally then the build server and production can also build/run your code.
"It automatically creates and manages a virtualenv for your projects, as well as adds/removes packages from your Pipfile as you install/uninstall packages."
Well, thanks but automate "python -m venv myvenv" ? Add/remove packages from a "Pipfile" ? Do I have to specify dependencies somwhere else than requirements.txt ? Why ?
There must be some use cases I'm not aware of.
Requirements.txt only lists versions of your project's requirements, but Pip actually automatically installs dependencies of those requirements too. And those versions aren't listed in your requirements.txt.
https://realpython.com/pipenv-guide/#dependency-management-w... -- This page about Pipenv vs pip + virtualenv goes into more detail.
Also if you manage to drop a dependency, you don't have an easy way to remove the things from requirements.txt that are only there because they're a subdependency.
Putting it all in one requirements.txt is just too simplistic.
- One with direct dependencies (versions pinned) - One with direct dependencies + subdependencies (pip freeze output)
Am I being too naive ? (obviously yes if such tool as pipenv exists, but I'm trying to figure why people need *.lock files).
It also adds dependency management. If one subdependency is library_a > 1.0, and another is library_b < 2.0 while also e.g. 2.1 exists, then it will try to find a version between 1.0 and 2.0. Pip doesn't do that.
So in my mind, that's what pipenv is -- pip, virtualenv, those two files, plus dependency management.
That's a lock file...
Is it easy to automatically do this when you want a new package version, without having to remember to do it? Is it easier to put together this process and train other developers in it and be diligent in its use? Is all of that easier than installing an application that has a similar interface to other tools, that does all that for you, and has a community of people to help with issues?
Boom, all recursive dependencies frozen to their current state.
I still think this is all too convoluted though. I hope an accepted de facto standard for this will emerge at some point.
Yes, that 'freezes' everything installed... but that's the point. If you want to update a direct dependency, you just do pip install -u <my-dep>. Any indirect dependencies are updated, and you freeze again.
Sometimes direct-dependency-a and direct-dependency-b have a conflict on which version of indirect-dependency-y you need. This is what we call doing 'actual work.'
In my experience, the issues come around when you try to build envs cross-platform. There are a lot of dependencies that have missing versions or bugs for certain platforms. This is not a pip/venv problem though--it is more of a python problem.
2. Because it's not at all clear that pipenv is a third party library. It's made by the same group that makes pip, so it's confusing that pip would be considered a de-facto standard but not pipenv when it's made by the same group, and under the same project in Github.
> However, to avoid recommending a tool that CPython does not provide, it is further proposed that the pip [18] package manager be made available by default when installing CPython 3.4 or later and when creating virtual environments using the standard library's venv module via the pyvenv command line utility.
sorry but what does freezing the dependency tree mean?
You may want this because you have a library that you shouldn't be pinning to the third decimal on a sem-ver package, but that you don't want to hiccup in CI due to a dot-release.
Or maybe you think a loose file your tooling can read, and a hyper-specific file your builder should read, is a better interface for a project.
With the added bonus that it also contains a hash of the package so if someone pushes a new version with the same version number it would complain that the hashes don't match.