I'm intrigued. I've been using virtualenv in numerous companies for about 8 years, traditionally wrapped in virtualenvwrappers, and now in uv.
UV doesn't change any of that for me - it just wraps virtualenv and pip downloads dependencies (much, much) more quickly - the conversion was immediate and required zero changes.
UV is a pip / virtualenv wrapper. And It's a phenomenal wrapper - absolutely changed everything about how I do development - but under the hood it's still just virtualenv + pip - nothing changed there.
Can you expand on the pain you've experienced?
Regarding "things that need to be deployed" - internally all our repos have standardized on direnv (and in some really advanced environments, nix + direnv, but direnv alone does the trick 90% of the time) - so you just "cd <somedir>", direnv executes your virtualenv and you are good to go. UV takes care of the pip work.
Has eliminated 100% use of virtualenvwrappers and direct-calls to pip. I'd love to hear a use case where that doesn't work for you - we haven't tripped across it recently.
Not quite; it reimplements the pip functionality (in a much smarter way). I'm pretty sure it reimplements the venv functionality, too, although I'm not entirely sure why (there's not a lot of room for improvement).
("venv" is short for "virtual environment", but "virtualenv" is specifically a heavyweight Python package for creating them with much more flexibility than the standard library option. Although the main thing making it "heavyweight" is that it vendors wheels for pip and Setuptools — possibly multiple of each.)
UV doesn't change any of that for me - it just wraps virtualenv and pip downloads dependencies (much, much) more quickly - the conversion was immediate and required zero changes.
UV is a pip / virtualenv wrapper. And It's a phenomenal wrapper - absolutely changed everything about how I do development - but under the hood it's still just virtualenv + pip - nothing changed there.
Can you expand on the pain you've experienced?
Regarding "things that need to be deployed" - internally all our repos have standardized on direnv (and in some really advanced environments, nix + direnv, but direnv alone does the trick 90% of the time) - so you just "cd <somedir>", direnv executes your virtualenv and you are good to go. UV takes care of the pip work.
Has eliminated 100% use of virtualenvwrappers and direct-calls to pip. I'd love to hear a use case where that doesn't work for you - we haven't tripped across it recently.