[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.