Is there a helper to merge venv1 and venv2, or create venv2 which uses venv1 dependencies and on load both are merged?
Is there a helper to merge venv1 and venv2, or create venv2 which uses venv1 dependencies and on load both are merged?
More importantly, at runtime you can only have one version of a given package, because the imports are resolved at runtime. Pip won't put multiple versions of the same library into the same environment normally; you can possibly force it to (or more likely, explicitly do it yourself) but then everyone that wants that library will find whichever version gets `import`ed and cached first, which will generally be whichever one is found first on `sys.path` when the first `import` statement is reached at runtime. (Yes, the problem is the same if you only have one venv in the first place, in the sense that your dependency graph could be unsolvable. But naively merging venvs could mean not noticing the problem until, at runtime, something tries to import something else, gets an incompatible version, and fails.)
uv supports groups and can create venv with the desired group set https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/dependencies/#development...
For example, there can be "dev" group that includes "test", "mkdocs", "nuitka" groups (nuitka wants to be run with venv it builds binary for, so to keep venv minimal, it is in a separate group)
In that perspective "merging" them directly defeats the purpose. What is needed is a better library ecosystem.
An important reason for using them is to test deployment: if your code works in a venv that only has specific things installed (not just some default "sandbox" where you install everything), then you can be sure that you didn't forget to list a dependency in the metadata. Plus you can test with ranges of versions of your dependencies and confirm which ones your library will work with.
They're also convenient for making neat, isolated installations for applications. Pipx wraps pip and venv to do this, and as I understand it there's similarly uvx for uv. This is largely about making sure you avoid "interference", but also about pinning specific versions of dependencies. It also lowers the bar somewhat for your users: they still need to have a basic idea of what Python is and know that they have a suitable version of Python installed, but you can tell them to install Pipx if they don't have it and run a single install command, instead of having to wrestle with both pip and venv and then also know how to access the venv's console scripts that might not have been put on PATH.