6 years of python and I've never really had that problem, also working on larger projects. Use poetry or uv and you'll probably be fine. Unless you're doing something strange with your dependencies. The only thing I would say is non trivial is updating the dependencies. And if a library has a bug or something you have to downgrade for. You can specify dev dependencies for notebooks and such. I've not heard of mlflow having a problem with a manager. Perhaps you're in a cloud environment and don't have access to poetry for example?

That's one of the main pain points of Python. Something like poetry or uv can help but the python ecosystem is just unstable. It's very hard to update a dependancy. You project might only run with very specific versions of libraries and the language itself.

I honestly hate that about python and I don't think python is good for developing large software. Even js/ts is a much better ecosystem. (I'm bracing for the hate)

What are you doing to get into dependency hell? Never had that problem. Are you running "pip install" in your venv at will?

Anti Commercial-AI license

It would be similar hell in for example Matlab or C/C++ if install of external packages were made so easy.

Some systems that are designed more with the concept of maintenance challenges (Windows and others) make it possible to have different versions installed simultaneously.

The need for the whole venv thing fundamentally underscores the problem. How many versions of libc do you have installed simultaneously? (docker users pls don't respond)

wreck is a dependencies manager, which is venv aware, BUT is not a venv manager nor does it put dependencies into pyproject.toml. Sticks with good ol' requirement files.

Assumes, for each package, it's normal to be working with several venv.

Syncs the dependencies intended for the same venv.

req fix --venv-relpath='.venv'
req fix --venv-relpath='.doc/.venv'

Across many packages, unfortunately have to resort to manually sync'ing dependencies.

Lessons learned

• have very recently ceased putting build requirements into requirement files. The build requirements' transitive dependencies should be in the requirement files. wreck does not support this yet. i'm manually removing dependencies like: build wheel setuptools-scm (setuptools and pip already filtered out) and click.

• syncing across packages is really time consuming. Go thru this pain, then no dependency hell.

Wrote wreck cuz all the other options were combining requirements management with everything including the bathroom sink. build backends ... venv management ... everything goes into pyproject.toml. All these ideas seem to just compound the learning curve.

Less is more especially when it comes to learning curve.

If you use conda, I suggest using pixi as a project manager. It has lock files which will fix dependencies, and it can activate your enviroments with scripts and variables defined in your pyproject.toml. It has been so much better than using conda directly: https://pixi.sh/

You'll likely also want to check out ruff for linting and formatting, by the same company that makes uv. It doesn't enable a lot of lints by default, but there's a long list of checks to enable.

They also have a typechecker, ty, which is still in early alpha. If it's as good as their other tools I expect it to become the standard for typechecking Python. Currently you'll likely want to go with pyright for that.