[elashri]

> Of course there are other package managers for Python that do this better

I think if you are comparing with what NPM does then you would have to say that native pip can do that too. It is just one command

`pip freeze > requirements.txt`

It does include everything in the venv (or in you environment in general) but if you stick to only add required things (one venv for each project) then you will get requirements.txt files

[Timon3]

Sure, you can manually do that. But my point is that pip doesn't do this automatically, and that is what makes so many Python projects essentially unusable without investing massive amounts of time into debugging. Good defaults and good standards matter a lot.

[elashri]

> without investing massive amounts of time into debugging

Again even if you are going to spend sometime to learn something that will have better tool for doing that like uv and poetry package managers. This is no massive amount of time. And eveb pip freeze is just one standard command and will give you portable environment be everything will be pinned in your environment. You just don't want to do everything with system global environment which is a common sense not a huge ask.

So I am not sure what is the massive amount of debugging needes for that.

[Timon3]

I am specifically talking about the scenario where I, someone experienced with Python, am trying to use a project from someone who is not experienced in Python. There is nothing I can change since the project was already created some time ago. Most of the time, the only way for me to get the project running is to spend a lot of time debugging version issues - to find combinations of dependencies that are installable, and then to see if they work in the application context, and then to see if any bugs are part of the application or the dependency.

You might explain that away by asking why I'd want to run these projects, but a large percentage of data science projects I've tried to run end up in this scenario, and it simply doesn't happen with npm. A command existing is not a valid replacement for good defaults, since it literally affects my ability to run these projects.

[whyever]

I don't think this is the same. Does it also cover transitive dependencies?

[elashri]

Sorry if what I said about NPM is not accurate. But in reality if you are pinning the dependencies (all of them actual get pinned) then when pip is installing it will grab the correct version of the transitive dependency (both packages are pinned)

So I am not sure when this will become a problem.