dusty.ninja

@diazona
Never even heard of hatch, flit, or pdm! It looks like uv is the simplest one to move to from venv.

@bryan Maybe so. I think it depends on what you've been doing with venv.

@diazona
I basically use like 1-5 different addons via pip. Sometimes a pip doesnt work with latest python so need to start with older python. I think my mac has 3-4 different python installs.

@bryan Oh wait, are you *developing* Python packages or *using* them? pip is normally for users, not developers.

I mean, developers are users it too, so technically we do all use pip or some equivalent, but it's a basic tool whose scope excludes a lot of the other features that a package developer needs. It'd be very common that a developer doesn't use pip very much directly, but via another tool that wraps it or provides higher-level functionality. The tools I mentioned (hatch etc.) are examples of such higher-level tools, among other things they can do.

@bryan Ah I see, sorry, I mistakenly thought we were talking about the package developer's experience. As a user you wouldn't need those other tools I mentioned (hatch, poetry, pdm, etc.); they're meant for package developers.

@bryan As a user I suppose it makes more sense for you to be manually creating virtual environments (with venv), since you don't have to manage them in the complex ways that developers have to. Although there are some venv wrapper tools that can simplify the user experience in certain cases: pipx, pipenv, and uv come to mind. (Well, uv kinda does everything - you can use it as a replacement for pip or also as a replacement for those higher level tools.)

It is definitely very normal to have many venvs and several versions of Python installed. (Though I don't know that it's normal to run into errors using pip that often 🤷 but you gotta do what works)