[lucideer]

I get you on unix philosophy (I'm not into it myself but I respect those who want that) but uv, for all its extra features, does actually do that particular "one thing" a lot better than pip.

You've summarised many of pip's internally problems well - there's also the lack of any attempt at proper manifest management. This is partially an ecosystem problem (pre-PEP518), but the tools inform the specs as much as the specs inform the tools.

I think there's also a reasonable argument to be made that uv only does one thing, & that the big problems in this space before was that python required using 3 tools to awkwardly collaborate to get one thing done. That one thing is dependency management: pip to pull them, venv to load them, pyenv to pull & load one of them (the interpreter).

[zahlman]

pyenv is a wrapper for something that experienced pip+venv users would find trivial. If you use uv, meanwhile, that is also wrapping venv. It's integrating those tasks under one command prefix, which is the main thing I don't like.

The other thing I don't like is having tens of megs of opaque compiled binary (that doesn't provide a useful library) when properly designed Python would perform more than acceptably for common use cases (tons of this is I/O-bound; a proper cache lets you just recursively hardlink a directory tree instead of unpacking an archive file; the bytecode compilation is implemented in C and could be parallelized with `multiprocess` as long as you don't require binary-level reproducibility for Python bytecode; etc.)