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Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but pip and venv don’t leave me impressed, so please elaborate why those are better.

I think that given pip and venv are bundled with Python, then anyone who wants to introduce new dependencies to replace them needs to justify themselves. I haven't used either pyenv or poetry so I have no opinion on them.

The benefit of pyenv seems clear to me - it's a simpler way to have multiple Python installs and manage which one is your "default" Python at a project, directory, user, system, and global level (they can even all be different).

Poetry...not so much. requirements.txt is good enough for me most of the time.

Poetry gives you exactly what pip and venv give you, with the two pretty much perfectly integrated, in a way that is pleasant to use and not something that you'll grudgingly migrate your project to after your fifth dependency.

Well, poetry gives you a lock file, separation between dev dependencies and runtime dependencies, and easy deployments to PyPI. If you're hacking a oneof-script you might not need these features, but for "real" projects Poetry is invaluable.

I have yet to find venv or pip lacking in anything I do - I think the onus is on external tools to prove their worth.

they're bundled.

unless you're on some flavor of ubuntu where they aren't bundled with the system python. then you're in python packaging hell.

I've been running stacks with venv and pip for years and it's been perfectly adequate. The main addon I use is virtualenvwrapper which basically just give sugar for mkvirtualenv and workon.

5 tools mentioned to get started working with Python dependencies. Am I ever glad to not deal with the language anymore.

I mean, like I said, there's really just venv and pip, and mentally I almost consider them the same tool (some say they ought to have been).

Node avoids the need for a "venv" because each project has its own "venv", which if you have a 700mb pytorch install, ick.

Rust/go don't deal with .so files to the extent python does, so cargo/godep have an easier time. Python is a C abstraction layer.

So like, I'm not sure how much less you need than "package manager" and "env manager".

> Yeah, but pip and venv don’t leave me impressed, so please elaborate why those are better.

Maybe you misspoke, but whether you are left impressed or not is your opinion. What is factual is that these tools are the ecosystem's default tools for their jobs, and have been for a long time. I have relied on them operating multiple production codebases over the course of a decade.

I think you need to elaborate on what about that doesn't suit your needs rather than that they don't impress you for some vague, unspecified and potentially arbitrary reason.

To answer your question, why do they impress me? They get out of my way, they work, and they don't require me to do anything but have a system version of Python installed. With them, I get reasonably sane package management and environment isolation without headaches. That's enough for me.

Whether they are better or not is up to you to decide, but "focus on simplicity and minimalism" is not what's going on here.

> don’t leave me impressed

I don't think impressing you was one of their design goals... If you claim different tools like poetry are better, then the burden of proof is on you

can you expand on what you meant here?

What things do you want to do that pip and venv can't (or make it difficult) to do?

What features does Poetry and Pyenv provide that these don't?

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