uv: An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust

This has the same issue as so many package managers for Python, namely, it doesn't provide a way for --no-binary to remain sticky.

There are times when you do NOT want the wheel version to be installed (which is what --no-binary implements in pip), but so many package managers including uv don't provide that core, basic functionality. At least for those that do use pip behind the scenes, like pipenv, one can still use the PIP_NO_BINARY environment variable to ensure this.

So I'll not be migrating any time soon.

Maybe not exactly what you need (sticky) but you can set UV_NO_BINARY=1

See https://docs.astral.sh/uv/reference/environment/#uv_no_binar...

It helps, that's for sure. But this sort of knowledge should not exist in the environment in any case. It should be part of the canonical package list, and not hidden away elsewhere. The whole idea of a dependency manager should be a centralized and consistent way to install everything you need and not be dependent on what values may or may not exist as a env-var.

Can you elaborate on the reasons why a package would need to declare that its dependencies must be installed from source rather than from pre-built binaries? I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where that capability would be used as anything other than a workaround for a deeper problem with how your dependencies are packaged.

Let's say you're developing a python package that relies on a native shared library. If you distribute it as a pre-compiled wheel, you're locking your users into the exact version and compilation flags, options, etc that you choose. So your question effectively boils down to "why do people need to compile their own software?".

Many reasons: you need more control, specialized hardware, testing newer versions of the library, maintaining an internal fork of a library, security, performance, the dev team maintains both the native library and python package and needs to keep them independent, or simply preference for dynamic linking against system libraries to avoid duplication.