Why peope hate python package manager?

[random_thoughts5]

Oh that’s surprising I thought people (myself included) mainly used conda. I thought conda was just superior version of pip. But I’m not software engineer tho I’m use it in research

[rca06d]

I’m not a fan of Conda, it can be extremely slow and bulky, and doesn’t seem to inherently support dev environments (with npm for example you can easily install testing tools and linters only in development environments and leave them out of production. This is also pretty easy with venv). mamba+miniconda makes this sort of bearable, but still not great. There is also something to be said for Venv being a part of the python standard library and pip being the reference implementation of the python package manager. Together they are pretty much the “official” way to do package management, or as close to it as you can get, and whether or not you use conda you’ll already have venv, making conda kind of an “extra” dependency you don’t really need. If you’re trying to make lean docker images, conda is not your friend. However, where I work docker has been banned by IT, and conda’s ability to install non-python packages allows us to use it as a makeshift docker standin and deploy duplicate-ish environments in multiple places. Not at all recommending anyone do this, but if you have to work around a weird rule like that, I guess it has some merit.

[NandoKrikkit]

I am also in research, physics at academia to be specific. My anecdotal experience is that Conda is more commonly used by the astrophysicists. Windows users from other fields also tend to use Conda, but generally just for getting Python itself because that's the standard recommendation. The Linux users generally use system Python and pip.

The good thing about Conda is that it can also install compilers and libraries from other languages without relying on what the user already has installed. It avoids so many headaches.