Reproducibility of Installations

00:00 Have you ever heard that joke of, oh, it doesn’t work for you, but it works on my machine? If you’ve never heard this joke, then good for you. But if you have, know that lack of reproducible installations can be the cause of your issues.

00:14 Because when you install a project, you need to install the project, and the dependencies of your project, and the dependencies of the dependencies of your project, and so on.

00:24 And sometimes even minor differences in the versions can make or break a piece of code. And that’s why when people collaborate on open-source projects or really any project, even if it’s not open source, you want to have installations that are reproducible.

00:42 uv supports this out of the box with their native lock file, which is platform independent or operating system independent. And that makes sure that wherever you are, whoever you are, when you install a project and its dependencies, you’re going to get the exact same versions as everyone else.

00:59 Now, pip does not support this out of the box. You would need another third-party tool to be able to have reproducible installations through the file requirements.txt.

01:09 So this leads us to a natural conclusion, which is if you need reproducible installs out of the box, you have to go with uv. If you don’t need these reproducible installations or if you’re okay with installing extra tools to make them work with pip, you can keep on watching to figure out how the maturity of these tools and their surrounding ecosystem might impact your choice between uv and pip.