WDYM by madness? I know what the flag is (and what it does), but people have strong opinions in opposite directions about what Python packaging should do around system environments.

I think we're doing what we should making isolated environments easy to use. I don't think we should take options away from people that need them.

It’s widely used, and there are still a lot of workflows that we hear about from users where they want/need to manually twiddle environments rather than having the “declarative” layer do it for them.

We have the interface because we care a lot about meeting people where they are.

We keep the interface because we care a lot about long-term support and compatibility. I cannot imagine removing it.

We generally want to add features to the top-level interface such that people don't need or want to use the pip-interface because the top-level interface does everything you need, but better.

For me, honestly not much.

Yes! We've been working on this for quite some time as it's one of the worst experiences in Python packaging today.

There are two PEPs that we're involved with that will provide the components for the ecosystem to properly declare metadata in this domain [1] [2].

We're also working on some features in uv, such as the torch backend option [3], to improve the situation in the interim.

We'll be announcing more in this area in the near future!

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0817/ [2] https://peps.python.org/pep-0825/ [3] https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/integration/pytorch/#automa...

Pixi is very focused on the Conda ecosystem and implements a sort of bridge across the Conda and PyPI ecosystems. I am very interested in solving the problems that motivated creation of the Conda ecosystem, but I want to do so by driving forward the PyPI ecosystem so those use-cases can be addressed in _many_ tools instead of just one. This is the main reason you don't see us pursuing Conda package support in uv directly (in the style of Pixi).

There have been several threads about us collaborating or converging, but there are no concrete plans to do so at this time. We share some Rust crates, e.g., Pixi uses our internals to solve the PyPI-side of their dependencies, and we occasionally fix or change things for each other.

Unfortunately dynamic metadata is not efficient for package resolution, so we don't want to encourage it. Instead, we want to design a better workflow for using source control for versioning, but haven't had the time to do so.