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Comment by micik | Hacker News Reader

i found uv frustrating. i dont know what problem is it trying to solve. it's not a tool for managing virtualenvs, but it does them as well. i guess it's a tool for dependency management. the "uv tool" stuff. kinda weird. i gave it an honest try but i was working around it with shell functions all the time.

in the end i went back to good old virtualenvwrapper.sh and setting PYTHONPATH. full control over what goes into the venv and how. i guess people like writing new tools. i can understand that.

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Maybe I "entered" the Python ecosystem at a different time, but I never used virtualenvwrapper.sh nor sat PYTHONPATH manually ever. When I first came into contact with Python, I think doing `virtuelenv venv && source venv/bin/activate` was what was recommended to me at the time. Eventually I used `python -m venv` but always also with `pip` and a `requirements.txt`. I pretty much stuck with that until maybe 1 year ago I started playing around with `uv`, and for me, I just use `uv venv|pip|init|add` from uv, and nothing else from any other tools, and generally do pretty basic stuff.

Maybe for more complex projects and use cases it's harder, but it's a lot faster than just pip and pyproject.toml is a lot nicer to manage than `requirements.txt`, so that's two easy enough wins for me to move over.

uv solves many problems, but one textbook case is the problem of running some arbitrary Python-based command-line tool, where 1/you don’t have any Python interpreter installed, 2/your OS-provided Python interpreter isn’t compatible with the tool, or 3/you want to run single or multiple tools from any arbitrary folder where your data already is, as opposed to adapting your workflow to fit the virtualenv or running the risk that two tools have conflicting dependencies that would make the virtualenv not work well.

Isn't what you're describing solved by `uv tool install`?

I’m describing the use cases that uv addresses.

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