by zahlman | 2025-08-13 21:38:45+00:00
> Why is that hard for the Python community to come up with a single tool to rule them all?

0. A lot of those "tools and concepts" are actually completely irrelevant or redundant. easy_install has for all practical purposes been dead for many years. virtualenv was the original third party project that formed the basis for the standard library venv, which has been separately maintained for people who want particular additional features; it doesn't count as a separate concept. The setup.py file is a configuration file for Setuptools that also happens to be Python code. You only need to understand it if you use Setuptools, and the entire point is that you can use other things now (specifically because configuring metadata with Python code is a terrible idea that we tolerated for far too long). Wheels are just the distribution format and you don't need to know anything about how they're structured as an end user or as a developer of ordinary Python code — only as someone who makes packaging tools. And "pypy" is an alternate implementation of Python — maybe you meant PyPI? But that's just the place that hosts your packages; no relevant "concept" there.

Imagine if I wanted to make the same argument about JavaScript and I said that it's complicated because you have to understand ".tar.gz (I think, from previous discussion here? I can't even find documentation for how the package is actually stored as a package on disk), Node.js, NPM, TypeScript, www.npmjs.com, package.json..." That's basically what you're doing here.

But even besides that, you don't have to know about all the competing alternatives. If you know how to use pip, and your only goal is to install packages, you can completely ignore all the other tools that install packages (including poetry and uv). You only have any reason to care about pipenv if you want to use pip and care about the specific things that pipenv does and haven't chosen a different way to address the problem. Many pip users won't have to care about it.

1. A lot of people actively do not want it that way. The Unix philosophy actually does have some upsides, and there are tons of Python users out there who have zero interest in participating in an "ecosystem" where they share their code publicly even on GitHub, never mind PyPI — so no matter what you say should be the files that give project metadata or what they should contain or how they should be formatted, you aren't going to get any buy-in. But beyond that, different people have different needs and a tool that tries to make everyone happy is going to require tons of irrelevant cruft for almost everyone.

2. Reverse compatibility. The Python world — both the packaging system and the language itself — has been trying to get people to do things in better, saner ways for many years now; but people will scream bloody murder if their ancient stuff breaks in any way, even when they are advised years in advance of future plans to drop support. Keep in mind here that Python is more than twice as old as Go.

3. Things are simple for Go/JS/TS users because they normally only have to worry about that one programming language. Python packages (especially the best-known, "serious" ones used for heavyweight tasks) very commonly must interface with code written in many other programming languages (C and C++ are very common, but you can also find Rust, Fortran and many more; and Numpy must work with both C and Fortran), and there are many different ways to interface (and nothing that Python could possibly do at a language level to prevent that): by using an explicit FFI, by dlopen() etc. hooks, by shelling out to a subprocess, and more. And users expect that they can just install the Python package and have all of that stuff just work. Often that means that compiled-language code has to be rebuilt locally; and the install tools are expected to be able to download and set up a build system, build code in an isolated environment, etc. etc. All of this is way beyond the expectations placed on something like NPM.

4. The competition is deliberate. Standards — the clearest example being the PEPs 517/518/621 that define the pyproject.toml schema — were created specifically to enable both competition and interoperation. Uv is gaining market share because a lot of people like its paradigms. Imagine if, when people in the Python community first started thinking about the problems and limitations of tools from the early days, decided to try to come up with all the paradigms themselves. Imagine if they got them wrong, and then set it in stone for everyone else. When you imagine this, keep in mind that projects like pip and setuptools date to the 2000s. People were simply not thinking about open-source ecosystems in the same way in that era.

> They should remove the "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." from the Python Zen.

First, define "it". The task is orders of magnitude greater than you might naively imagine. I know, because I've been an active participant in the surrounding discussion for a couple of years, aside from working on developing my own tooling.

Second, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44763692 . It doesn't mean what you appear to think it does.