A few lines of shell script remedies that rather nicely. And there will be times when you need to choose between installing from fully resolved, pinned dependencies versus abstract immediate ones.
uv solves this better, including supporting Windows, and with significantly better error reporting. It even installs Python for you. uv also has platform-independent lockfiles and a number of other features. Oh, and it's a lot faster as well.
Nix solves this better, including supporting Windows, and with significantly better error reporting. It even installs Python for you. Nix also has platform-independent lockfiles and a number of other features. Oh, and it's a lot faster as well.
Have higher standards for your devtools.
Nix is quite a bit harder to use, and absolutely does not support Windows. (WSL is nice, but does not count as supporting Windows.)
Nix is also what I like to call "totalizing" — in order to use Nix you must fit everything into the Nix world. This has many advantages (as do Buck2 and Bazel which are similarly totalizing), but is also quite onerous and might not be desirable.
Further, I believe Nix makes pinning to old versions of a dependency, and maintaining custom patches on top of a dependency, somewhat difficult.
