But you are just using virtualenv with pip. It doesn't change any of the moving pieces except that uv is virtualenv aware and will set up / use them transparently.
You've been able to have the exact same setup forever with pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv except with these nothing ever has to be prefixed. Look, uv is amazing and I would recommend it over everything else but Python devs have had this flow forever.
> But you are just using virtualenv with pip.
No, you aren't.
> It doesn't change any of the moving pieces
It literally does, though iyt maintains a mostly-parallel low-level interface, the implementation is replaced with improved (in speed, in dependency solving, and in other areas.) You are using virtual environments (but not venv/virtualenv) and the same sources that pip uses (but not pip).
> You've been able to have the exact same setup forever with pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv except with these nothing ever has to be prefixed.
Yes, you can do a subset of what uv does with those without prefixes, and if you add pipx and hatch (though with hatch you’ll be prefixing for much the same reason as in uv) you’ll get closer to uv’s functionality.
> Look, uv is amazing and I would recommend it over everything else but Python devs have had this flow forever.
If you ignore the parts of the flow built around modern Python packaging standards like pyproject.toml, sure, pieces of the flow have been around and supported by the right constellation of other standard and nonstandard tools for a while.
Right, it's a reimplementation, a really good one, but it doesn't change how Python packaging and dev environments work mechanically. The PEP that would have actually changed Python packaging to be more like NPM (https://peps.python.org/pep-0582/) was rejected.
> If you ignore the parts of the flow
I don't get this, pip has worked with pyproject.toml since its standardization https://peps.python.org/pep-0621/. You don't need any constellation of tools, the only pieces that aren't provided by upstream is the version manager and the virtualenv manager. The new packaging flow has also worked with the authoritative pypa tools since their standardization https://peps.python.org/pep-0517/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0518/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0751/
Again, uv is great, I just think people are giving this one tool too much credit for the standardization process (that uv is an implementation of) that actually addressed Python packaging issues. Like for example uv run, that's all https://peps.python.org/pep-0751/