Loopwerk: Revisiting uv

Almost two months ago I compared Poetry with uv, and for me uv had some pretty significant drawbacks that kept me from switching over – the two big ones being the lack of dependency groups, and the inability see outdated packages.

I’m very happy to say that both these issues have been solved in recent updates of uv, and I am definitely going to switch my Python projects from Poetry to uv. Yes, the smaller drawbacks are unchanged: uv is not written in Python, locking out most of the Python community from contributing; Astral, the company behind uv doesn’t seem to have a way to monetize their work; and I think the command interface for uv still doesn’t make much sense. But I can forget about all of that when uv has such clear benefits – especially its ability to manage the installed Python version.

Since version 0.4.7 dependency groups are properly supported in uv, and now you can add dependencies to any custom group you want:

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