Comment by charliermarsh 2 days ago
To clarify, `ruff` and `uv` aren't being merged. They remain separate tools. This is more about providing a simpler experience for users that don't want to think about their formatter as a separate tool.
The analogy would be to Cargo: `cargo fmt` just runs `rustfmt`, but you can also run `rustfmt` separately if you want.
API-first or API-only backends are a sweet spot for today's Rust, IMO, and its resource footprint, reduced maintenance long-tail, and performance properties are all super competitive. It's especially hard to find another language that can compete with Rust on all three of those at once.
Isn’t there `uv tool run ruff` already for this? Or `uv run ruff` if it’s a proper dependency? I’m not sure what’s the point of a special shortcut command, unless there are plans to make it flexible so it’ll be an abstraction over formatters (unifying ruff, black, etc).
Yeah, you can definitely use `uvx ruff` (an alias for `uv tool run ruff`) to invoke Ruff. That's what I've done in my own projects historically.
The goal here is to see if users like a more streamlined experience with an opinionated default, like you have in Rust or Go: install uv, use `uv init` to create a project, use `uv run` to run your code, `uv format` to format it, etc. Maybe they won't like it! TBD.
(Ruff is installed when you invoke `uv format`, rather than bundled with the uv binary, so if you never use `uv format`, there aren't any material downsides to the experiment.)
Would you ever consider bundling ruff binaries with uv releases similar to uvx and uvw? It would benefit offline users and keep compatible uv/ruff versions in sync.
Perhaps even better… cargo-like commands such as uv check, uv doc, and uv test could subsume ruff, ty, and other tools that we haven’t seen yet ;)
A pyup command that installs python-build-standalone, uv, python docs, etc. would be totally clutch, as would standalone installers [0] that bundle it all together.
[0] https://forge.rust-lang.org/infra/other-installation-methods...
It's part of the mission for uv to become "cargo for python". A one stop swiss-army knife for everything you need to manage a Python project. I think it'll get a `uv test` command at some point too.
The whole point is you just install `uv` and stop thinking about the pantheon of tools.
It'll be interesting to see how the test is done. At the tox level, or the pytest level? (Or another level?) I can see all being useful and ergonomic, but tox's multi-environment setup might fit into it really well.
Is `uv format` supposed to be an alias for `ruff check`?
Stupidly I ran `uv format` without `--check` (no harm done and I can `git diff` it) so I didn't see the changes it made but `ruff check` does still show things that can be fixed with `ruff check --fix`. If I'm guessing correctly the difference is coming down to the fact that I have (in my submodule where all changes were made) a pyproject.toml file with ruff rules (there's also a .flake8 file. Repo is being converted). Either way, I find this a bit confusing userside. Not sure what to expect.
I think one thing I would like is that by default `uv format` spits out what files were changed like `uv format --check` does (s/Would reformat/Reformatted/g). Fine for the actual changes not to be displayed but I think this could help with error reduction. Running it again I can see it knows 68 files were changed. Where is that information being stored? It's pretty hard to grep out a number like that (`grep -R \<68\>`) and there's a lot of candidates (honestly there's nothing that looks like a good candidate).
Also, there's a `--quiet` flag, but the output is already pretty quiet. As far as I can tell the only difference is that quiet suppresses the warning (does `--quiet` also suppress errors?)
uv format
warning: `uv format` is experimental and may change without warning. Pass `--preview-features format` to disable this warning.
36 files reformatted, 31 files left unchanged
uv format --quiet
36 files reformatted, 31 files left unchanged
Anyways, looking forward to seeing how this matures. Loved everything so far!
That makes some more sense. I think I just misunderstood what Charlie was saying above.
But I'll also add another suggestion/ask. I think this could be improved
$ ruff format --help
Run the Ruff formatter on the given files or directories
$ uv format --help
Format Python code in the project
$ ruff format --help
Formats the specified files. Acts as a drop-in replacement for black.
$ uv format --help
Experimental uv formatting. Alias to `ruff format`
> To clarify, `ruff` and `uv` aren't being merged.
ruff at least seems to be compiled into uv, as the format worked here without a local ruff. This is significant more than just an interface. Whether they are managed and developed as separate tools doesn't matter.
> This is more about providing a simpler experience for users that don't want to think about their formatter as a separate tool.
Then build a separate interface, some script/binary acting as a unified interface, maybe with its separate distribution of all tools. Pushing it into uv is just adding a burden to those who don't want this.
uv and ruff are poor names anyway, this could be used to at least introduce a good name for this everything-python-tool they seem to aim for.
ruff is not compiled into uv; it's bootstrapped from an independent build, much like how `cargo fmt` is bootstrapped from a separate toolchain component (rustfmt). You can see how that works in the PR[1]. Importantly, that means that you don't experience any build-, install-, or run-time burden if you don't use this subcommand.
Thank you for writing software for all of us Python day-jobbers who wish we were writing Rust instead.