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Why I finally ditched Poetry for uv

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Astral’s blazing-fast package manager is eating the whole Python tooling ecosystem.

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Intro

Let’s take a quick look back at Python packaging and how it has evolved throughout the years. If you’ve been around Python for a while, you’ve probably lived through a few eras of packaging.

First it was:

• setup.py
• requirements.txt
• pip install
• python -m venv
• maybe virtualenv
• maybe pip-tools
• maybe pyenv

Everything worked, but nothing really worked together. Locking wasn’t official. Environments were manual. Reproducibility required discipline. CI setups were fragile. Dependency conflicts were common.

Then Poetry came in and brought peace.

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It gave us much:

• pyproject.toml as the single source of truth
• Proper lock files
• Built-in virtualenv management
• A clean CLI
• A unified workflow