I would look at this comment[0] by sametmax for a critique of pip. My main gripe with virtualenv is that it's required at all: other interpreted languages, like node and elixir for example, have figured out how to handle non-global dependencies without a third-party package. Beyond that, it's frustrating to deploy because its non-relocatable (in our build/deploy scripts at my last python job we had to use sed all over the place to fix paths), and I find it semi-annoying to have a bunch of different copies of interpreter and all that goes with it (though this is mostly a minor annoyance -- it doesn't take up that much space and it doesn't matter if it gets out of sync.
Also notable, IMO, is the lack of a tool like rbenv or rustup for python. I can't tell you how many times I have had to try to figure out which python version a given pip executable worked with.
> like node [...] have figured out how to handle non-global dependencies
Node would be the last place I'd look for a good solution in. Not sure if there was some progress recently, but it was hell some time back. Modules were huge, taking thousands of other modules with them, majority of those being duplicates. There was no deduplication, no version wildcards I believe either. It wouldn't even work with some tools because the path would end up being hundreds of characters long.
Since npm 3 (about 18 months ago), the node_modules dir tree is now 'flat' and de-duped (where possible).
There have always been version wildcards as far as I know. Long paths caused by the deeply nested tree were a problem in Windows only, addressed (I believe, I can't find open issues on it) by the flattening in npm 3.
Oh cool, I actually hadn't seen pyenv before. Looks like it does indeed solve my problems (from a glance anyway, though I didn't see anything about pip in the readme).
> Beyond that, it's frustrating to deploy because its non-relocatable (in our build/deploy scripts at my last python job we had to use sed all over the place to fix paths)
pip does cache the wheels so instead of moving the virtualenvs around, just recreate them. This also ensures the virtualenv is up to date. Using tox this is fairly easy to do.
Sure virtualenv is a bit of a hack but it's not that bad.
I'm mostly talking about moving between different machines. I would like to be able to tar up my source code and venv, distribute it to multiple machines, untar it and run it. However that's not possible with virtualenv unless you do a lot of hackery in your build. In particular, creating a virtualenv on each server during deploy is not an option.
> My main gripe with virtualenv is that it's required at all: other interpreted languages, like node and elixir for example, have figured out how to handle non-global dependencies without a third-party package.
venv is in the stdlib since 3.3. (Though I agree with the annoyance at the need.)
Also notable, IMO, is the lack of a tool like rbenv or rustup for python. I can't tell you how many times I have had to try to figure out which python version a given pip executable worked with.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13460490