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by _vya7 366 days ago
I remember using pip and venv back in like 2009. Last time I checked, maybe 5 or 10 years ago, the recommendation of the community was generally to just use Docker instead of all these tools. Did that not catch on?
3 comments

The advice seems to change every year. For a while it was venv, then pipenv, poetry, docker, and now uv. Maybe the ecosystem will settle on that but who knows.
I mean docker is orthogonal to package manager. It makes it easier to deploy but none of the other thing also have managers do are relevant.
Docker was always a workaround to Python not having a non-awful dependency manager. uv is that non-awful dependency manager, and I expect in the long term it will reduce the use of Docker.
Docker solves a different problem. Docker is a way to basically ship your whole OS off to another machine. You still have to have a way to install the right version of python and all the python libraries you need inside the Docker container, and uv is great for this.

Secondly Docker only solves a subset of problems. It's fine if you're developing a server that you will be deploying somewhere. It's inconvenient if you're developing an end user application, and it's completely useless if you're developing a library you want people to be able to install.