[peterdsharpe]

This was a disappointing article: based on the provocative title, I was hoping to learn something new. Everything in here is already clear to anyone who has read the "Getting Started" page of uv, and I don't know anyone who is making these mistakes (system-wide package installs on a venv-first package manager?) with uv.

[fluidcruft]

I'm going to be honest: uv made sense to me because I already knew poetry and it was mostly a glance at the intro and then searching to figure out how to do XYZ that I already knew how to do. I can't really say learning about uv workspaces make any freaking sense to me from to docs. I don't think it's unfair to consider uv's documentation to be reference material rather than learning tools.

Now, I'm not saying I learned anything from the article (I gave up when it was talking about "uv pip" which I have never ever used and have no real idea why anyone would ever use, but that's okay). I don't think the article is a good fit for the HN python audience, and that's also okay. But I don't doubt many people can find value in it. "uv pip" exists even though I have never used it so clearly someone must be using it. I haven't used pip in years so it's not a reference point I am starting from. People do use pip and that's okay. Those people didn't suffer through figuring out poetry etc.

I do suspect that people who do system install of packages want uv workspaces. I think I want to migrate to that for my less engineered one-off jupyter calculations stuff since so far the things I've managed to get working for that sort of project have been either monorepos (which have their own issues) or millions of venvs (which constantly sync and take up space). But again I've tried to read and figure out that uv workspaces workflow and I give up after an hour or so of not figuring it out. So that's just to say I have learned to only go to astral's docs as references and even then they are incomplete (I had to guess a bit how to add a git repo via ssh as a dependency)

[reuven]

A lot of people I know, including many of my students, first heard about uv as a lightning-fast replacement for pip. That's what piqued their interest, and that's also more or less where they stopped. Just yesterday, someone was asking me about whether uv knows about handling different versions of Python, or if it only installs packages.

So your points are all valid -- but I'm trying to address pain points people have repeatedly raised, and that I myself experienced, and flatten the learning curve for as many people as possible.

[reuven]

Sorry to disappoint! I can tell you that many people I've met, including those who have read the documentation, kept asking questions about how to use uv. This article is a summary that I came up with, based on my experience and theirs.

System-wide package installs are a weird quirk of my own work, since I'm doing very little product development and lots of one-off classes. I'm not at all recommending that "normal" developers do this, and I make sure to say that in all of the courses I teach.