Hacker News Reader

Comment by marknsikora | Hacker News Reader

Good article. But the Makefile part should really be replaced by tox as a best practice. Tox even has a uv runner now that will handle setting up all the environments.

View on HN

There’s a bit of a bootstrap problem there in that Tox (and its dependencies) have to be installed first, unless your makefile is calling “uv run tox” or similar. Uv’s standalone nature makes it ideal for bootstrapping projects in a way that tox isn’t.

I like just or mise tasks as often my python projects contain many other language commands (SQL, docker, pnpm, etc ...).

IMO mise tasks are fairly close to the ideal polyglot task runner, because features like argument definitions can be used as progressive enhancements. That means I can write the task logic in shell scripts that can be called without mise, and when I integrate them into mise, I don't have to manually write extra wrappers or duplicate anything. That's my pet peeve with most similar tools, so I can't recommend mise enough!

Strong disagree on tox. I was all in on it back in 2020-2023 and I found it was a consistent source of headaches and complexity. Whenever we’d run into venv issues it was always tox, often passing or not passing some critical under-the-hood ENV var resulting in reproducibility errors that were difficult to immediately diagnose. It also blurs the line between env vars used to set up tox env and those you want set in your final test env.

We just use containers in CI instead now for matrix testing and it’s so much more clear what is going on with the test env.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com