[slightwinder]

> Why not have smaller venvs for separate projects?

Because they are annoying and unnecessary additional work. If I write something, I won't know the dependencies in the beginning. And if it's a personal tool/script or even a throwaway one-shoot, then why bother with managing unnecessary parts? I just manage my personal stack of dependencies for my own tools in a giant env, and pull imports from it or not, depending on the moment. This allows me to move fast. Of course it is a liability, but not one which usually bites me. Every some years, some dependency goes wrong, and I either fix it or remove it, but at the end the benefit I save in time far outweighs the time I would lose from micromanaging small separate envs.

Managing dependencies is for production and important things. Big messy envs is good enough for everything else. I have hundred of script and tools, micromanaging them on that level has no benefit. And it seems uv now offers some options for making small envs effortless without costing much time, so it's a net benefit in that area, but it's not something world shattering which will turn my world upside down.

[zelphirkalt]

Well, if generating a lock file and installing dependencies is "unnecessary" then you obviously don't have any kind of need to be production ready project. Any project serious about managing its dependencies will mandate hashsums for each dependency, to avoid things having issues a week or a month later, without change to the project.

If you do have a project that needs to manage its dependencies well and you still don't store hashsums and use them to install your dependencies based on them, then basically you forfeit any credibility when complaining about things going wrong with regard to bugs happening or changed behavior of the code without changing the code itself and similar things.

This can be all fine, if it is just your personal project, that gets shit done. I am not saying you must properly manage dependencies for such a personal project. Just not something ready for production.

I for one find it quite easy to make venvs per project. I have my Makefiles, which I slightly adapt to the needs of the project and then I run 1 single command, and get all set up with dependencies in a project specific venv, hashsums, reproducibility. Not that much to it really, and not at all annoying to me. Also can be sourced from any other script when that script uses another project. Could also use any other task runner thingy, doesn't have to be GNU Make, if one doesn't like it.