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.
> PATH-driven interpreter selection is the source of the detours. uv eliminates interpreter ambiguity but requires uv as a prerequisite.
Also, to use uv like this you either need to specify its path, or as shown in the example invoke /usr/bin/env. The Linux shebang requires a path rather than an executable name, and a relative path only works if you're in the exact right directory.
So in practical terms we have gained nothing, since if we want to avoid "PATH-driven interpreter selection" we could specify an absolute path like /usr/bin/python in the shebang, and uv doesn't let us avoid that.
That said, the PEP 723 interface is really nice (there's a lot more going on in the example than just figuring out which Python to use), and the experience of using uv as the interpreter is nicer in the sense that you only need uv to exist in one place. (This, too, is a problem that can be solved just fine in Python, and there are many approaches to it out there already.)
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.