[zahlman]

>Nearly every other language solves this better than this.

"Nearly every other language" determines the exact version of a library to use for you, when multiple versions would work, without you providing any input with which to make the decision?

If you mean "I have had a more pleasant UX with the equivalent tasks in several other programming languages", that's justifiable and common, but not at all the same.

>What your suggesting breaks down on large projects.

Pinned transitive dependencies are the only meaningful data in a lockfile, unless you have to explicitly protect against supply chain attacks (i.e. use a private package source and/or verify hashes).

[baq]

IMHO the clear separation between lockfile and deps in other package managers was a direct consequence of people being confused about what requirements.txt should be. It can be both and could be for ages (pip freeze) but the defaults were not conductive to clear separation. If we started with lockfile.txt and dependencies.txt, the world may have looked different. Alas.

[zahlman]

The thing is, the distinction is purely semantic - Pip doesn't care. If you tell it all the exact versions of everything to install, it will still try to "solve" that - i.e., it will verify that what you've specified is mutually compatible, and check whether you left any dependencies out.

[jshen]

What's your process for ensuring all members of a large team are using the same versions of libraries in a non trivial python codebase?

[zahlman]

If all you need to do is ensure everyone's on the same versions of the libraries - if you aren't concerned with your supply chain, and you can accept that members of your team are on different platforms and thus getting different wheels for the same version, and you don't have platform-specific dependency requirements - then pinned transitive dependencies are all the metadata you need. pyproject.toml isn't generally intended for this, unless what you're developing is purely an application that shouldn't ever be depended on by anyone else or sharing an environment with anything but its own dependencies. But it would work. The requirements.txt approach also works.

If you do have platform-specific dependency requirements, then you can't actually use the same versions of libraries, by definition. But you can e.g. specify those requirements abstractly, see what the installer produces on your platform, and produce a concrete requirement-set for others on platforms sufficiently similar to yours.

(I don't know offhand if any build backends out there will translate abstract dependencies from an sdist into concrete ones in a platform-specific wheel. Might be a nice feature for application devs.)

Of course there are people and organizations that have use cases for "real" lockfiles that list provenance and file hashes, and record metadata about the dependency graph, or whatever. But that's about more than just keeping a team in sync.

[jshen]

So you a re proposing to manually manage all transitive dependencies?