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Comment by hallvard | Hacker News Reader

Why (keep) the `uv pip` interface?

We have the interface because we care a lot about meeting people where they are.

We keep the interface because we care a lot about long-term support and compatibility. I cannot imagine removing it.

We generally want to add features to the top-level interface such that people don't need or want to use the pip-interface because the top-level interface does everything you need, but better.

Fair points; the reason for asking is that it seems counterintuitive from the outside perspective for you to maintain/extend the pip interface as well?

And of course that some colleagues of mine insist on using `uv pip` for anything and everything, which feels wrong…

Granted it’s a great feature which made the transition to uv smooth in the first place.

So far the maintenance burden has been quite bearable and extending pip provides us with an opportunity to explore and encourage improvements upstream which are still beneficial to a lot of people.

Laudable goals. Have you considered gating imperative commands behind a setting, maybe `tool.uv.pip.unreproducible = true` or somesuch? This would gently guide people towards better workflows, and also be a starting point for documenting the drawbacks of `uv pip` since it's a setting they'd be forced to add and presumably they'll read the docs for it first.

uv already does something similar with `tool.uv.pip.break-system-packages`.

I hadn't considered that, it's an interesting idea. We generally hold a very high bar for nagging users or gating behaviors. It's possible we'll reach a point someday where this is appropriate! I think you're right that we need to teach people better workflows, but that's happening organically as use of the tool grows and people's first exposure to a Python project is `uv init` and `uv add` rather than `pip`.

Perhaps something requiring opt-in sooner, so project maintainers can - through config - say "we don't use the pip interface on this project"?

FWIW, break-system-packages comes directly from pip's interface, it's not a novel addition from uv.

If Astral/OpenAI are willing to support uv pip in the long term, why do you think they should use a stick as well as a carrot to get people on uv's top level interface?

While uv's standard workflows probably works for 80+% of people, at least if they learn them, I certain do a lot of stuff with uv pip and pip that can't be replicated.

Also both uv pip and pip support installing from pylock.toml files, which are fully reproducible.

It’s widely used, and there are still a lot of workflows that we hear about from users where they want/need to manually twiddle environments rather than having the “declarative” layer do it for them.

I'll confess to using `uv` almost every day for the last year+ - and I've never used anything other than `uv pip install` for package management.

Is there any compelling reason not to?

uv pip is a brilliant adoption gateway, you get all of the speed gains for a 3 char change

Yeah, I don't think I'd have made the jump otherwise, since convincing others on the team would have been much harder.

Yes omg keep uv pip please

Agreed, I'd prefer it stick around for the long-term because I use it when creating temporary venvs to screw around with things that I'm not certain about committing to in my actual projects for example. I guess I could do that with scripts but it's nicer/easier to use uv pip

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