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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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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