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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

I usually stay away far FAR from shiny new tools but I've been experimenting with uv and I really like it. I'm a bit bummed that it's not written in Python but other than that, it does what it says on the tin.

I never liked pyenv because I really don't see the point/benefit building every new version of Python you want to use. There's a reason I don't run Gentoo or Arch anymore. I'm very happy that uv grabs pre-compiled binaries and just uses those.

So far I have used it to replace poetry (which is great btw) in one of my projects. It was pretty straightforward, but the project was also fairly trivial/typical.

I can't fully replace pipx with it because 'uv tool' currently assumes every Python package only has one executable. Lots of things I work with have multiple, such as Ansible and Jupyterlab. There's a bug open about it and the workarounds are not terrible, but it'd be nice if they are able to fix that soon.

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uv is great, but downloading and installing base python interpreter is not a good feature as it doesn’t fetch that from PSF but from a project on GitHub, that very same project says this is compiled for portability over performance, see https://gregoryszorc.com/docs/python-build-standalone/main/

>that very same project says this is compiled for portability over performance

Realistically, the options on Linux are the uv way, the pyenv way (download and compile on demand, making sure users have compile-time dependencies installed as part of installing your tool), and letting users download and compile it themself (which is actually very easy for Python, at least on my distro). Compiling Python is not especially fast (around a full minute on my 4-core, 10-year-old machine), although I've experienced much worse in my lifetime. Maybe you can get alternate python versions directly from your distro or a PPA, but not in a way that a cross-distro tool can feasibly automate.

On Windows the only realistic option is the official installer.

Yes, which is why it's silly to do it. Developers (not "users"!) need to learn how to install Python on their system. I honestly don't know how someone can call themselves a Python developer if they can't even install the interpreter!

The Python community has the attitude that everyone needs to be welcomed; I mostly agree, and I don't see the point in fussing about what people want to call themselves. Everyone starts somewhere, and people try really hard to help (one random example from 2022: https://discuss.python.org/t/python-appears-in-cmd/15858)

But overall, computer literacy is really on the decline these days. Nowadays before you can teach programming in any traditional sense, you may have to teach the concept of a file system, then a command line...

I for one enjoy the convenience of automatically installing python versions. Yes I know how to do it manually. Yes it is possible to install multiple versions. But that does not mean I want to do it every time, just to test how things behave in different python versions. For that, it's also okay if it does not install the most performant version of the interpreter.

Sure. We've had system package managers for decades. I install a major version once a year and it gets automatically upgraded to the latest patch version by my system package manager, just like everything else.

>Yes it is possible to install multiple versions. But that does not mean I want to do it every time, just to test how things behave in different python versions

You only have to do it once per version with this approach. Then you can create venvs from that base, and it's basically instantaneous if you do it `--without-pip`.

that it does it automatically is weird

I've only noticed after my corporate firewall stopped me!

But PSF doesn't distribute binary builds, so what's the alternative?

it does of course here https://www.python.org/downloads/ or are you referring to linux?

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