[epistasis]

It's not about finding old packages, it's about not finding the magical compatible set of package versions.

Pip is nice in that you can install packages individually to get around some version conflicts. But with conda and npm and CRAN I have always found my stuck without being able to install dependencies after 15 minutes of mucking.

Its rare that somebody has left the equivalent of the output of a `pip freeze` around to document their state.

With snakemake, I abandoned conda and went with pip in a venv, without filing an issue. Perhaps it was user error from being unfamiliar with conda, but I did not have more time to spend on the issue, much less doing the research to be able to file a competent issue and follow up later on.

[devjab]

It’s a little hard for me to talk about Python setups which don’t use Poetry as that is basically the standard around here. I would argue that not controlling your packages regardless of the package manager you use is very poor practice.

How can you reasonably expect to work with any tech that breaks itself by not controlling its dependencies? You’re absolutely correct that this is probably more likely to be an issue with Python, but that’s the thing with freedom. It requires more of you.