`venv` is fine. The work of just creating the virtual environment is hardly anything, and `venv` really can't screw it up. If you create environments `--without-pip`, it's actually faster than `virtualenv` and `uv venv` in my testing (because those are fundamentally doing the same thing with a little extra window dressing). What slows it down is bootstrapping Pip into the new environment, via the standard library `ensurepip`, which requires running zipped un-bytecode-compiled code from a bundled wheel.
(As it happens, this is the exact topic of the blog post I'm currently in the middle of writing.)
Pip is indeed not great (understatement - there are many other things about it that I have picked on or will pick on in this series).
>Venv and setup tools aren't really package managers.
Setuptools nowadays is a build backend. Long ago (when expectations were much lower), Pip had Setuptools as a dependency, and the combination was about as close to a "package manager" as anyone really cared for. But Pip today really can't be called anything like a "package manager" either - it only installs the packages, and resolves dependencies. It records some basic information about the dependency graph of the things it installed - in the sense that it preserves such information from the wheels it installs - but it doesn't really do any processing of that information. If you ask it to remove packages it's (last I checked) not very smart about that. It doesn't help you figure out what packages you need, and it doesn't help you maintain your `pyproject.toml` file.
And, of course, it doesn't create or keep track of virtual environments for you. (Pipx does the latter, wrapping Pip and `venv`, but it only installs "application" packages that define an entry point.)
Poetry and PDM are the only things listed that really belong to the same category as uv. They're not only package managers, but complete workflow tools. (Conda is a package manager, for languages other than Python as well, but it's not meant to take over your entire Python workflow in the same way.) They even wrap themselves around the process of uploading to PyPI (which seems really excessive to me; seriously, `twine` is fine too.)
(As it happens, this is the exact topic of the blog post I'm currently in the middle of writing.)
Pip is indeed not great (understatement - there are many other things about it that I have picked on or will pick on in this series).
>Venv and setup tools aren't really package managers.
Setuptools nowadays is a build backend. Long ago (when expectations were much lower), Pip had Setuptools as a dependency, and the combination was about as close to a "package manager" as anyone really cared for. But Pip today really can't be called anything like a "package manager" either - it only installs the packages, and resolves dependencies. It records some basic information about the dependency graph of the things it installed - in the sense that it preserves such information from the wheels it installs - but it doesn't really do any processing of that information. If you ask it to remove packages it's (last I checked) not very smart about that. It doesn't help you figure out what packages you need, and it doesn't help you maintain your `pyproject.toml` file.
And, of course, it doesn't create or keep track of virtual environments for you. (Pipx does the latter, wrapping Pip and `venv`, but it only installs "application" packages that define an entry point.)
Poetry and PDM are the only things listed that really belong to the same category as uv. They're not only package managers, but complete workflow tools. (Conda is a package manager, for languages other than Python as well, but it's not meant to take over your entire Python workflow in the same way.) They even wrap themselves around the process of uploading to PyPI (which seems really excessive to me; seriously, `twine` is fine too.)