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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

Poetry?

And pipenv, or just literally manually creating a venv. Uv didn't invent that, it's winning on speed mainly, and then capitalising on starting with a base that includes multiple general improvements in the Python ecosystem.

uv also installs the python version your project needs which is a huge pain in the ass if you use some old Linux distro with outdated python.

Like pyenv pioneered for python and nvm for node ? ;)

Years ago

Sure, but it's not a matter of capability but of low friction and sane defaults.

These things matter though a lot of developers don't seem to understand that.

In a uv project I can just git clone, cd, uv sync and I am ready to go. Nothing in the python ecosystem offered that before.

> uv sync

You can also just do "uv run", and it will automatically sync as necessary!

I think that's one of the things that uv does great and often goes unnoticed: It's hard to use wrong for a layman. Forgetting to run the equivalent sync command in most other Python package mangers could have resulted in a myriad of different bugs caused by out of sync packages, leading to hours of wasted debugging.

> In a uv project I can just git clone, cd, uv sync and I am ready to go. Nothing in the python ecosystem offered that before.

`poetry install` does the same thing except for downloading Python.

I transitioned from Poetry to uv. Other than being mildly faster and providing workspaces, uv doesn't really change at all how one interacts with and manages a project. And in fact, uv just adds additional quirks and gotchas and limitations, including storing authorization keys in plain text.

uv also duplicated things in the Python ecosystem but then didn't implement the same feature sets, so you often end up needing to call the existing tool, just like you did in Poetry.

I suspect, that lots of people hyping uv didn't have any proper reproducible project setups beforehand and didn't have to find solutions to that before uv. If they had, they would know about Poetry and how to use it.

I am of the same opinion, that uv didn't actually change all that much, if you have a sane project setup. I don't do anything with it, that I didn't do before with Poetry and before that with Pipenv. What I need is a way of installing dependencies, checked against a lock file, reliably. Poetry does that. If uv disappeared today, I would go back to Poetry and wouldn't miss all that much.

But there are the people who want to write one-off scripts with loosely defined dependencies inlined into the scripts. I don't do that. I would just copy my Makefile and pyproject.toml file from another project and adjust it and then run the script just as well with locked dependencies. Why do anything less. If I want to be really sloppy, I can just pip install.

I tried really hard to do things the right way before uv, but it was just a major PITA. Poetry in particular looked really exciting when I first discovered it, but I eventually just got bogged down with the speed and its inability to resolve dependencies even for recent versions of pretty mainstream packages. It didn't 'just work' once you got beyond toy projects.

I admit I hadn't really realised astral was a private company before though. What is their roadmap for monetising all this work?

Hm, that's strange. I have used Pipenv and Poetry years ago, to reproducibly build data science environments that people used to learn about data science and data analysis. I don't think you can call that "toy projects". I guess you just had bad luck with some specific dependencies. What I do remember though is, that Poetry had far fewer problems than Pipenv had. Pipenv was still a fight, though I won every time one way or another.

Yea, it's interesting. My comment is negative in votes, but I went back to it to see. Everything I said is factual, so I don't know. People are endlessly impressed by uv's whizbang speed, it seems. In reality, it's _yet another tool_ trying to reinvent the Python ecosystem.

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