Don't know nowadays, but a few years back when I was still using python something that drove me nuts from pip was how bad it was at managing transitive dependencies.
If package A depends on package B 1.0 and package C also depends on package B but 2.0, the order in which you run pip install for A or C will lead to a different version of B. And of course either A or V would break as soon as they hit an incompatibility. Obviously you would notice that only by running the application or tests.
So you have to use pip freeze to kind of generate a semi lock file,and every project uses it in a different way, because you also need different dependencies files for dev and production....and these are just plain TXT files which I don't think it is the best "format" for this.
Then you have these text files but also a "setup.py" which is for the package you produce, but hey you need to read the txt because otherwise you need to maintain them in two places. So you add a Makefile to tie all of this together, and that's another rabbit hole.
Add to this the mess of virtualenvs already explained in sibling comments and you have the perfect storm.
I know that nowadays are things such as Poetry, which work a lot better, but there are a good bunch of tools competing with each other.
To make an analogy, npm feels like using the latest, top of the line Macbook while pip feels like using a Casio calculator from 1985 with an external keyboard. That's the gap I feel between these two tools.
So if you ever use python, try first poetry or any of the other tools, pip is a terrible mess.
If package A depends on package B 1.0 and package C also depends on package B but 2.0, the order in which you run pip install for A or C will lead to a different version of B. And of course either A or V would break as soon as they hit an incompatibility. Obviously you would notice that only by running the application or tests.
So you have to use pip freeze to kind of generate a semi lock file,and every project uses it in a different way, because you also need different dependencies files for dev and production....and these are just plain TXT files which I don't think it is the best "format" for this.
Then you have these text files but also a "setup.py" which is for the package you produce, but hey you need to read the txt because otherwise you need to maintain them in two places. So you add a Makefile to tie all of this together, and that's another rabbit hole.
Add to this the mess of virtualenvs already explained in sibling comments and you have the perfect storm.
I know that nowadays are things such as Poetry, which work a lot better, but there are a good bunch of tools competing with each other.
To make an analogy, npm feels like using the latest, top of the line Macbook while pip feels like using a Casio calculator from 1985 with an external keyboard. That's the gap I feel between these two tools.
So if you ever use python, try first poetry or any of the other tools, pip is a terrible mess.