[geofft]

> Pip freeze does not resolve transitive dependencies

I don't think this is correct:

    $ python3 -m venv /tmp/v
    $ /tmp/v/bin/pip install flask
    [...]
    Collecting MarkupSafe>=0.23 (from Jinja2>=2.10.1->flask)
    [...]
    $ /tmp/v/bin/pip freeze | grep MarkupSafe
    MarkupSafe==1.1.1

> nor does pip know what to do if your transitive dependencies conflict with each another

This is true, but because Python exposes all libraries in a single namespace at runtime, there isn't actually anything reasonable to do if they genuinely conflict. You can't have both, say, MarkupSafe 1.1.1 and MarkupSafe 1.1.0 in PYTHONPATH and expect them to be both accessible. There's no way in an import statement to say which one you want.

However, it's notable that pip runs into trouble in cases where transitive dependencies don't genuinely conflict, too. See https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/988 - this is a bug / acknowledged deficiency, and there is work in progress towards fixing it.

[marmaduke]

> There's no way in an import statement to say which one you want.

This would be fixable with a sys path hook, were pip so inclined

[geofft]

It would change the semantics of the language. You could also write a sys.path hook to interpret the remainder of the file as Ruby and not Python, were pip so inclined....

(Also it's not clear what those changed semantics would be.)

[marmaduke]

Import system is pluggable, so the semantics are there to be customized. Sure, it could be abused (as many things in Python), but an import hook that checks for a vendored dependency with specific version, seems like a reasonable way to resolve the problem above.

> remainder of the file as Ruby and not Python

That's a little excessive

[geofft]

But it changes the semantics of the rest of the language, e.g., if two modules interoperate by passing a type of a third module between themselves, and now there are two copies of that third module, they can't communicate any more.

Getting this right and reliable would be a) a considerable language design project in its own right and b) confusing to users of Python as it is documented, and in particular to people testing their modules locally without pip. It wouldn't be as drastically different a language as Ruby, but it would certainly be a different language.