[black3r]

> Most of the complaints here ironically are from people using a bunch of tooling in lieu of, or as a replacement for vanilla python venvs and then hitting issues associated with those tools.

That's because the vanilla python venvs feel like a genius idea but not thought out thoroughly, they feel as if there's something missing..., So there's naturally lots of attempts at improvements and people jump at those...

And when you think about it in bigger depth, venvs are themselves just another one of the solutions used to fix the horrible mess that is python's management of packages and sys.path...

The "Zen of Python" says "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.", so I can't understand why it's nowhere near as easy when it comes to Python's package management...

[JohnFen]

Honestly, virtual environments are one of the reasons why I prefer to avoid Python whenever I can.

[earthboundkid]

To me, the virtual environments are a symptom. The cause is people defending Python even when it’s not as good as the alternatives. Every language has flaws. Every language has things it can learn from other languages. Every language is a trade off of different features. But somehow Python packaging, despite being really unpleasant compared to other languages and quite stagnant, is defended very vigorously in these threads (which lol are constantly recurring, unlike other languages). Just last week, I tried to install a Python program from 2020. I failed. I think the problem is that it relied on Pandas and maybe Pandas from then doesn’t work? I have no idea what the real flaw was, but jeez, it’s annoying to have people act like there is no problem. Yes, there is a big problem! This is a dead parrot.

[bombolo]

why?

Also, you don't have to use them.

[9dev]

Which leaves you with what, not installing packages or sharing packages between everything on my system and all apps I work on? The 80ies just called, they want their development methodologies back.

[bombolo]

Is this a response?

I asked what's wrong with a venv and I got a rant…

[JohnFen]

It strikes me that virtual environments are a fairly ugly hack to smooth over the fact that Python is not a stable language. It changes a lot, requiring the use of particular runtimes for particular Python code, requiring the installation of multiple runtimes.

That's a pretty serious downside to the language. Virtual environments are needed to help people deal with that downside.

[bombolo]

Uh? To me they're just a convenient quick way to install stuff that I don't want to install system-wide, if I want to do some quick experimenting.

The normal, permanent, stuff gets installed system wide the normal way, with apt.

[ElectricalUnion]

Well, if develop and ship in a vm/container, you don't have to do it in your system /s