Second, what exactly would you like to happen in that instance? You want to have, in a single project, the same library but at different and conflicting versions. The only way to solve that is to disambiguate, per call site, each use of said library. And guess what, that problem exist and was solved 30 years ago by simply providing different package names for different major version. You want to use both gtk 1 and gtk 2 ? Well you have the "gtk" and "gtk2" package, done, disambiguated. I don't think there is any package manager out there providing "gtk" and having version 1 and 2, it's just "gtk" and "gtk2".
Now we could design a solution around that I guess, nothing is impossible in this brave new world of programing, but that seems like a wasted effort for not-a-problem.
So you are saying that (a) I made this up and (b) intentionally so.
How so? I am always flabbergasted when people make such statements.
You know nothing of my use of Python. I work in a specific field (computer graphics) and within that an even more specific sub field, visual effects.
I have to use Python maybe every three months. And there is some dependency related pain every single time. Python's dependency management "is straight up terrible" (quoted from elsewhere in this thread), I concur.
And thusly, in my world, this example is not "contrived" and given the aforementioned circumstances -- that were unknown to you -- even less so "purposefully".
> Second, what exactly would you like to happen in that instance?
I would expect Python to namespace-wrap (on-the-fly) conflicting versions.
See Rust for some similar solution.
> [...] a wasted effort for not-a-problem.
If this was "not-a-problem" why would Rust/cargo go out of its way to solve it? And why would people regularly point out for this to be one of the reasons dependencies are indeed a "not-a-problem" in Rust and how great that is compared to whatever else they battled with before?
Indeed you and I do live in different worlds.
Sit down, have a coffee, re-read your whole comments, create bullet points for your case, and try to have an *objective* look at your arguments.
- Your are frustrated with your use case, seemingly to the point where you don't care about reasonable arguments but just want to lash out at something.
- By your own description, you have a specific use case, in a specific field, in a narrower sub field.
- You are not primarily a Python developer, and use it every 3 months when you have to.
Your experience, in your field, on your project, does not make you a poster child of what everyday Python is like. Sorry for the news.
Now I get that frustration of "I just want things done and not care about that whole ecosystem", but the reality is, that's not a Python thing, it's a "that's not my preferred stack thing".
I have that same feeling whenever I need to get things done in a stack I don't know, and get stuck by something <insert preferred stack> does.
I used Rust the other day and ended up in a case where I needed to implement a trait I do not own. Well that ended up not being possible. That pissed me off for a time, that *really* made the most sense for my use case. Yet... I'm not going to complain that Rust is unusable because of "trait ownership hell" on the internet.
If we let the frustration aside for a minute:
Your use case, as a fact, is very contrived.
One does not stumble into projects that need to work with different, incompatible, similarly named, versions of a same library, every day.
As I mentioned, when that need arises, library maintainers usually just create a new package, with a different name.
That is what have been done for 99.99% of package managers ever in existence, be it system package managers, or language package managers.
And the reason for it is really just common sense:
- It does not happen very often
- Whenever that happens, the solution of providing a new package is the simplest and most well established
- The pattern works, and has been used since 30 years
- It is unambiguous
Note that Rust does _not_ magically solve that problem either, as there is no one size fits all solution to this problem. The best Rust can do, is:
- In the subset use case of this problem where said dependency is solely accessed from the inside of another dependency
- And said library symbols need not be externally accessible
- And said library data structures need not be shared
- Then Rust can build the outer most dependency against a specific version of said inner dependency.
That's not my experience and e.g. uv hasn't helped me with that. I believe this is an issue with Python itself?
If parent was saying something "grossly ridiculous" I must be doing something wrong too. And I'm happy to hear what as that would lower the pain of using Python.
I.e. this was assumably true three years ago:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70828570/what-if-two-pyt...