Comment by baby_souffle
5 hours ago
> Why not just use a Python container rather than rely on having the latest binary installed on the system?
Sometimes this is the right answer. Sometimes docker/podman/runc are not an option nor would the headache of volumes/mounts/permissions/hw-pass-through be worth the additional mess.
It is hard to over-state how delightful putting `uv` in the shebang is:
in `demo.py`:
#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run
# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.13"
print("hello, world")
Then `chmod +x demo.py; ./demo.py`
At no point did I have a detour to figure out why `python` is symlinked to `python3` unless I am in some random directory where there is a half-broken `conda` environment...
Yes, PATH-driven interpreter selection is the source of the detours. uv eliminates interpreter ambiguity but requires uv as a prerequisite. This improves portability inside environments that standardize uv; it’s not “portable to machines with nothing installed.”
Though, this isn’t about avoiding installs; it’s about making the one install (uv) the only thing you have to get right, instead of debugging whatever python means today.
I was advocating for containers as the “hard isolation / full stack” solution which eliminate host interpreter ambiguity and OS drift by running everything inside a pinned image. But you do need podman and have the permissions set right on it.