(I will likely base a blog post in my packaging series off this comment later.)

What people seem to miss about Pip is that it's by design, not a package manager. It's a package installer, only. Of course it doesn't handle the environment setup for you; it's not intended for that. And of course it doesn't keep track of what you've installed, or make lock files, or update your `pyproject.toml`, or...

What it does do is offer a hideously complex set of options for installing everything under the sun, from everywhere under the sun. (And that complexity has led to long-standing, seemingly unfixable issues, and there are a lot of design decisions made that I think are questionable at best.)

Ideas like "welllll I use poetry but pyenv works or you could use conda too" are incoherent. They're for different purposes and different users, with varying bits of overlap. The reason people are unsatisfied is because any given tool might be missing one of the specific things they want, unless it's really all-in-one like Uv seems like it intends to be eventually.

But once you have a truly all-in-one tool, you notice how little of it you're using, and how big it is, and how useless it feels to have to put the tool name at the start of every command, and all the specific little things you don't like about its implementation of whatever individual parts. Not to mention the feeling of "vendor lock-in". Never mind that I didn't pay money for it; I still don't want to feel stuck with, say, your build back-end just because I'm using your lock-file updater.

In short, I don't want a "package manager".

I want a solid foundation (better than Pip) that handles installing (not managing) applications and packages, into either a specified virtual environment or a new one created (not managed, except to make it easy to determine the location, so other tools can manage it) for the purpose. In other words, something that fully covers the needs of users (making it possible to run the code), while providing only the bare minimum on top of that for developers - so that other developer tools can cooperate with that. And then I want specialized tools for all the individual things developers need to do.

The specialized tools I want for my own work all exist, and the tools others want mostly exist too. Twine uploads stuff to PyPI; `build` is a fine build front-end; Setuptools would do everything I need on the back-end (despite my annoyances with it). I don't need a lockfile-driven workflow and don't readily think in those terms. I use pytest from the command line for testing and I don't want a "package manager" nor "workflow tool" to wrap that for me. If I needed any wrapping there I could do a few lines of shell script myself. If anything, the problem with these tools is doing too much, rather than too little.

The base I want doesn't exist yet, so I've started making it myself. Pipx is a big step in the right direction, but it has some arbitrary limitations (I discuss these and some workarounds in my recent blog post https://zahlman.github.io/posts/2025/01/07/python-packaging-... ) and it's built on Pip so it inherits those faults and is that much bigger. Uv is even bigger still for the compiled binary, and I would only be using the installation parts.