[tstrimple]

Not the OP, but I work in consulting. When I was still hands on keyboard, this would have been very helpful for the clients who don’t provide their own hardware or environment for us to use. I also do work for extremely large organizations who have literally dozens of different stacks accumulated over the decades.

In addition, I play with all sorts of open source tools and they often come with their own tool chains and expectations. Python version management in particular benefits a lot from this level of isolation. Instead of figuring out the different version management tools for each stack I use a higher order environment management tool in Nix.

Some others are solving these issues with containers, and that’s a part of the nix strategy as well.

[kfajdsl]

I've previously used Nix to manage C/C++ projects and ended up with a really nice flow, so I really want to use Nix for Python, since I've had so many issues with conda. However, every time I've tried, I've ran into enough issues trying to get a lot of ML packages I use to work (dealing with transitive dependencies on esoteric packages, mostly) that I couldn't justify continuing rather than just hacking my way to getting the conda environment working with random pip packages, pinned versions, etc.

[otabdeveloper4]

Conda is a bad idea, eventually conda will crap the bed and start hanging indefinitely. The cool kids don't use conda anymore.

[__MatrixMan__]

I've been considering an AI project for consuming a conda build recipe and digging into the codebase to extract extra info about the project and make it into a nix flake--which would be a bit more stable. I figure you could test for equivalence in a few ways and feed the outputs of that test back into the model. Hopefully there's enough context in the conda recipe, the project codebase, and whatever errors pop out to get some of them converted with minimal handholding.

Because regardless of what the cool kids are doing, important work is being done in conda, and usually by people whose expertise isn't software packaging.

[whatwhaaaaat]

Yeah I get the idea but I’m asking op for concrete examples. Python has its own environment management options that work well. I’ve read on this site over and over what it can do - I’m wondering if anyone has hard examples of tooling they switch about enough to make it worthwhile.

[otabdeveloper4]

If Python environment management works well for you, then stick with that. You'd be in the minority, though.

Nix is a pain in the ass, people mostly use it because it's the only reliable option.