No kidding about pip. The dependency resolver change several years ago was a similar terrible move to the PEP being considered here. It broke so much legitimately working code for no good reason; just paternalism from the core devs. The change pushed my team to stop using pip at all for dependency management.
Hard disagree there. It was way too easy to get yourself into an incompatibility hell with the old resolver, where package A relied on transitive dependency X v1.2 and package B needed X v2.1. Which version of X you got depended on whether you installed A or B first.
Yes, the new version did mean I had to straighten out a few projects that were already working before, but they were working by coincidence because my code paths weren’t stumbling across the incompatibilities. The problem already existed. The new resolver just exposed it.
My case was different from yours. Our project wasn't working by coincidence, the dependency resolver was flagging incompatibilities that simply didn't apply to our case, and began refusing to build a stable working project. Yes it's more risky to override that kind of guardrail, that's why I would only do it when I know the risks and tradeoffs and determine it's the best course of action on balance. I strongly believe that tools should ultimately work for the user, over dogmatic principles.
I'm fine with the those safety guardrails being the default behavior, but removing any sort of escape hatch because the pip devs think that they know better than the users of the tool 100% of the time is what I object to.
In the end we ended up ditching pip entirely for this use case and ended up with a much better system, with absolutely no disasters as a result, but we had a burn a lot of time and angst that could have been spent on actual problems we were trying to solve.
> If you don’t want pip to actually resolve dependencies, use the --no-deps option. This is useful when you have a set of package versions that work together in reality, even though their metadata says that they conflict. For guidance on a long-term fix, read Dealing with dependency conflicts.
