Stuff that is actually included with Python tends to be more stable than random Pypi packages, though.
NPM packages also sometimes change. That's the world.
I just installed Python 3.13 with pip 24.2, created a venv and installed a package - and nothing, no file was created and nothing was saved. Even if I touch requirements.txt and pyproject.toml, pip doesn't save anything about the package.
This creates a massive gap in usability of projects by people not very familiar with the languages. Node-based projects sometimes have issues because dependencies changed without respecting semver, but Python projects often can't be installed and you have no idea why without spending lots of time looking through versions.
Of course there are other package managers for Python that do this better, but pip is still the de-facto default and is often used in tutorials for new developers. Hopefully uv can improve things!
It is very fast and tracks the libraries you are using.
After years of venv/pip, I'm not going back (unless a client requires it).
So no need to mess around with brew/deadsnakes and multiple global python versions on your dev system.
This is actually an improvement over the node/nvm approach.
I think if you are comparing with what NPM does then you would have to say that native pip can do that too. It is just one command
`pip freeze > requirements.txt`
It does include everything in the venv (or in you environment in general) but if you stick to only add required things (one venv for each project) then you will get requirements.txt files
As some posters mentioned uv takes care of a lot of that and you can even pin it to a version of python.
If it’s just a one off script you can get all the dep information in the script header and uv can take care of all the venv/deps for you if you transfer the script to another machine by reading the headers in a comment section at the start of the script.
All this is based on PEPs to standardise packaging. It’s slow but moving in the right direction.
Turns out one dependency had 3 major releases in the span of a year! (Which basically confirms what I was saying, though I don't know how typical that is.)
