written on Wednesday, August 21, 2024
It has been a few months since I wrote about Rye here last. You might remember that in February I passed over stewardship of my Rye packaging too to Astral. The folks over there have been super busy in building a lot of amazing tooling for Python packaging in the last few months. If you have been using Rye in the last few months you will have noticed that the underlying resolver and installer uv got a lot better and faster.
As of the most recent release, uv also gained a lot of functionality that previously required Rye such as manipulating pyproject.toml files, workspace support, local package references and script installation. It now also can manage Python installations for you so it's getting much closer.
If you are using Rye today, consider this blog post as a reminder that you should probably starting having a closer look at uv and give feedback to the Astral folks.
I gave a talk just recently in Prague at EuroPython about my current view of the Python packaging, the lessons I learned when creating Rye and one of the things I mentioned there is that the goal of a packaging tool has to be that it will dominate the space. The tool that absolutely everybody uses has to be the best tool: it's the thing any new person to Python gets to see when they start their programming journey. After that talk a lot of people walked up to me and had a lot of questions about that in particular.
Python in the last two years has become an incredibly hot and popular platform for many new developers. That has in part been fueled by all the investments and interest that went into AI and ML. I really want everybody who gets to learn and experience Python not to remember it as an old language with bad tooling, but as an amazing language with a stellar developer experience. Unfortunately that's not the case today because there is so much choice, so many tools that are not quite compatible, and by the inconsistency everywhere. I have seen people walk down one tool, just to re-emerge moving their entire stack to conda and back because they hit some wall.
Domination is a goal because it means that most investment will go into one stack. I can only re-iterate my wish and desire that Rye (and with it a lot of other tools in the space) should cease to exist once the dominating tool has been established. For me uv is poised to be that tool. It's not quite there today yet for all cases, but it will be in no time, and now is the moment to step up as a community and start to start to rally around it. That doesn't mean that this tool will be the tool forever. Things come and go and maybe there is a future for some other tool.
But today I'm looking forward to the moment when there will be a final release of Rye that is no remaining functionality other than to just largely alias to uv, that retires Rye specific functionality and migrates you over to uv.
However I only have the power to retire one tool, and that won't be enough. Today we are using so many other package managing solutions for Python and we should be advertising fewer. I understand how much time and effort went into many of those, and everybody's contributions are absolutely appreciated. Software like Rye and uv were built on the advancements of the ecosystem underneath it. They leverage years and years of work that went into migrating the Python ecosystems from setup.py files to eggs and finally wheels. From not having a metadata standard to having one. From coupled to decoupled build systems. Much of what makes Rye so enjoyable were individuals that worked towards making redistributable and downloadable Python binaries a possibility. There was a lot of work that was put into building out an amazing ecosystem of Rust crates and Python libraries needed to make these tools work. All of that brought us to that point where we are today.
But it is my believe that we need to take the next step and be willing to say as a community that some tools are no longer recommended. Maybe not today, but that moment will come quicker than we think. I remember a time when many of us who maintained Python libraries pointed new developers to using ez_setup.py and easy_install in our onboarding guides. Years later we removed the mentions of ez_setup.py from our guides to replace them with pip. Some of us have pointed developers at pip-tools, at poetry or PDM. Many projects today even show 5 different installation guides because of that wild variety of tools available because they no longer feel like they can recommend one.
If you maintain an important Python project I would ask you to give uv a try and ask yourself if you would consider pointing people towards it. I think that this is our best shot in the community at finding ourselves in a much better position than we have ever been.
Have a look at the blog post that Charlie from Astral wrote about what uv can do today. It's a true accomplishment worth celebrating and enjoying.
Postscriptum: there is an elephant in the room which is that Astral is a VC funded company. What does that mean for the future of these tools? Here is my take on this: for the community having someone pour money into it can create some challenges. For the PSF and the core Python project this is something that should be considered. However having seen the code and what uv is doing, even in the worst possible future this is a very forkable and maintainable thing. I believe that even in case Astral shuts down or were to do something incredibly dodgy licensing wise, the community would be better off than before uv existed.