[Feynmanix]

Perhaps it's not clear from my description above, but I'm afraid the flaw is in the Python package ecosystem itself rather than pip. I'm not very familiar with uv, but from what I can tell from the documentation, it needs to execute the same steps as pip to resolve metadata, as this is required by various PEPs. (You can have a look at the diagram in the linked blog post https://medium.com/data-science-collective/pipask-know-what-...).

But I also get your point - advanced users who care about security may not be using pip. Implementing the functionality as a plugin for uv or poetry is actually the next step I'm considering, if people find the concept of pipask useful. What do you think?

[WhatIsDukkha]

I simply wouldn't use this as is but I would like it if it was a uv plugin, poetry seems like a dead end in 2025 to me.

[sneak]

Why don’t we update pypi to require publishing dependency metadata along with packages, so that the deps can be resolved without running code?

[zahlman]

Dependency metadata is published within packages - both for wheels (prebuilt) and sdists (source that requires a build step - these projects often include non-Python code, but you can still request an entirely pointless build step for a Python-only project. But please read https://pradyunsg.me/blog/2022/12/31/wheels-are-faster-pure-... and don't do that.)

PyPI even extracts it in most cases, to my understanding, so that installers can solve for the right versions of dependencies without downloading entire packages. (But the metadata for the project is still fragmented across multiple per-distribution files.)

However, source distributions are still allowed to have metadata - including dependencies - marked as "dynamic" (i.e., declaring that they'll be determined during the build process). This is rarely necessary (and probably happens much more often than is necessary), but a very complex project might for example have different dependencies based on specific details of the user's environment that aren't currently expressible in the existing environment markers (see https://peps.python.org/pep-0508/).

My experience with the Python ecosystem has been that it tries a bit too hard to make absolutely everyone happy (despite all the times that quite a few people end up unhappy). Today's concessions to backward compatibility always seem to make tomorrow's even harder to implement.

[pseufaux]

Isn't this what pyproject.toml solves? Genuine question as I am blissfully unaware of the intricacies dependency resolution.

[zahlman]

Short version, although you already got an answer:

If everyone had to use it, and everyone were only allowed to use "static" dependencies determined ahead of time, yes. But:

* legacy projects that don't use pyproject.toml are still supported

* it's possible to publish an "sdist" source package that's built on the user's machine (for example, because it includes C code that's highly machine specific and needs to be custom built for some reason; or because the user wants to build it locally in order to link against large, locally available libraries instead of using a massive wheel that copies them)

* When something is built locally, it's permissible to determine the dependencies during that build process (and in some rare cases, that may be another reason why an sdist gets used - the user's environment needs to be inspected in order to figure out what dependencies to fetch)

* Even if it did work, `pyproject.toml` is really more like "source code" for the metadata (about dependencies and other things). The real metadata is a file called `PKG-INFO` when it appears in an sdist, or `METADATA` in a wheel. The format is based on email headers (yes, really).

[Feynmanix]

Have a look at the diagram in the accompanying blog post https://medium.com/data-science-collective/pipask-know-what-... , it explains how the process works.

In short, you can get metadata from pyproject.toml, but (a) it can still involve executing code due to PEP 517 hooks, and (b) a malicious package would use the legacy setup.py to get their code executed.

[pseufaux]

That's a super helpful diagram. Saved it for later in case I have to explain to someone else. Thank you. I can see why something like pipask would be helpful. I saw in another comment that you are looking to make a uv plugin. I'll be on the lookout for that getting released!