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How does flit compare to poetry? The seem to be both doing the same thing, and in a very similar way.

Poetry does much more than Flit, like resolving dependencies, creating a lock file, and managing an environment where you can run your code. In particular, Poetry is meant to support application development (where you want to have a fixed version of your dependencies) as well as library development.

Flit is more aimed at being the simplest possible thing to put a package on PyPI, if that's all you want to do. It expects you to list dependencies in pyproject.toml manually.

I feel like this is a good place to mention Pip-tools [0] which can generate a lockfile of sorts from a standard requirements.txt (or a setup.py). Specifically, it resolves all dependencies (including hashes), and writes them to a new "requirements" file that you can read with the usual `pip install -r`.

The nice part about Pip-tools versus Flit or Poetry or Pipenv is that Pip-tools lets you keep using Setuptools if you want to, or if you're unable to switch to one of the others for some reason (and valid reasons do exist).

[0]: https://pypi.org/project/pip-tools

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