I use it because I'm not happy with the install-on-the-fly dependency resolution used by the others. This uses package-specified deps when avail (most wheels), and a custom database otherwise.
Also manages Python version / installations, and is a simpler process.
It works quite well for the use case covered by the alternatives.
I have great hopes for the upcoming versions, specially the "poetry bundle" command: https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/1992
See full roadmap here: https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/1856
Kudos to @sdispater (Sébastien Eustace) and the contributors !
However, lately we've had real struggles with pytorch, which admittedly is an odd participant in the Python ecosystem, in that it has a variety of installables depending on the CUDA version you want. And lately I've lost many hours trying to figure out how internal ML library A and dependent CLI tools package B can express their dependencies in ways that they can be installed as regular pip packages from where they live in our private GitHub repos.
The most recent serious comparison I've seen since March is this one: https://frostming.com/2021/03-26/pm-review-2021/
That includes pipenv, poetry, and PDM. One of our data science folks has suggested using conda. That gives me the willies, as it seems too heavy and too differently targeted, but that's not a real reason to say no.
Does this mean that you are keeping forks of the projects in your repo?
What I've been using but is probably not best practice is: - A private PyPi instance (Nexus) for caching external packages - All our projects, services, everything live in a monorepo - All our code is developed as packages with a setup.py that lists the minimal required dependencies for each project - "builds" of services are docker images that copy the necessary sources and do a `pip install -e <package for our service>`
The downside of this is if requirements are changed, updating your personal development environment means trashing and remaking the environment (relatively quick) or rerunning `pip install -e` for the given project.
I would only recommend using conda if you are developing on Windows. Even today there's still packages missing binary wheels and compiling other people's code on Windows to build/install a package sucks.
At another company I've seen: - Each service and internally developed package had its own git repository - Projects used dependency links[1] to get the packages from the git
I didn't like this approach because it split up tasks and created a lot of PRs. In the first setup with a monorepo you could see all the changes in one PR.
[1]https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36544700/how-to-pip-inst...
More details: https://nvie.com/posts/better-package-management/
I’ve heard a lot of recommendations for poetry too.
The Wright Brothers didn't benefit from advances in engines and materials, rather, they were the first ones to realize what the requirement actually was to fly in an airplane and not tumble uncontrollably in the air. Most people either had no idea or they fooled themselves into thinking they could succeed without addressing a particular issue. The Wrights looked at the problem squarely and didn't think they could get away without doing something essential which is the main reason people fail to succeed at something new.
I think the problems that pipenv solves aren't the real problems. (Kinda the way that you were not in control of your environment and you added docker and now you have two problems.)
Poetry's dependency solving approach is almost right, but the fact that you can't really know what an egg depends on without running setup.py keeps it solidly in the 'almost' category.
I use poetry a lot, my only real complaint is that it is undisciplined to not be able to put your source code under "src/" and that poetry corrupts itself periodically, especially when you try to update it.
Pip's dependency solving approach is outright wrong. You can't do
pip install A
pip install B
...
Pyflow mentioned in this thread is getting close.
---
Something missing from this is that Python still has footguns that can defeat you and your tools.
For instance the user-install directories are visible to all the Pythons you have installed so if somebody feels entitled to do
pip install --user A
Also the industry is finally realizing that it is toxic for the default charset for Python/Java/C#/... to be configurable (not utf-8 and only utf-8 and always utf-8 and never anything else) because if it is configurable it will inevitably be configured wrong sometimes.
Related to that there is a flag that will crash your program if you ever "print" a character which doesn't exist in UTF-8. Too many people will say "easy, be careful what you print()" but if you
pip install enough-things
The stock Python is getting better in these regards but there was a time I was looking into building it myself so I could remove these featurebugs. (That's my beef with pipenv is that unless I have a non-defective Python to install with it, it will install a defective Pytjon)