Fyn: An uv fork with new features, bug fixes, stripped telemetry

https://github.com/duriantaco/fyn

by BiteCode_dev • 4 months ago

90 74 4 months ago

github.com

trollbridge• 4 months ago

Looks great, and in particular, uv’s cache growing forever and lack of the uv shell command were both maddening.

I assume mainstream uv development will go into maintenance mode now, so it’s great to see a quality lineage like this.

tcbrah• 4 months ago

love that "we removed the telemetry" is now a headline feature worth forking an entire project over. says a lot about where dev tooling is headed tbh

tfrancisl3• 4 months ago

There was no "telemetry" in uv to begin with. They're just aiming for an emotional response. Read about the "telemetry" they removed and you'll find it funny.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 4 months ago

There was no "telemetry" in uv to begin with. They're just aiming for an emotional response. Read about the "telemetry" they removed and you'll find it funny.

I would personally prefer it be spelled out better, but I assume we're looking at this:

https://github.com/duriantaco/fyn/blob/main/MANIFESTO.md#no-...

uv was sending a surprising amount of info to package indexes every time you installed something. These things include your OS, py version, CPU architecture, Linux distro, whether you're in CI. All baked into the User-Agent header via something called "linehaul". We ripped that out. Now it just sends fyn/0.10.13. That's it.

Unless you're disputing the factual angle (I confess I tried to look at the commits, saw that the first couple commits in the repo changed over a thousand files, and gave up)... yes? I would describe sending OS, python version, CPU arch, and CI yes/no as telemetry. I guess we can quibble about whether there's a more precise term for this particular form of sending information about your machine to a remote target without asking, but the description seems fair enough.

bovermyer• 4 months ago

I like the direction this fork is going in. I will wait to use it until it achieves a little more critical mass in adoption, though.

albinn3• 4 months ago

The shell and upgrade commands are helpful, especially when onboarding someone who has not used uv before.

Crazy that there is not way in uv to limit the cache size. I have loved using uv though, it is a breath of fresh air.

worksonmine2• 4 months ago

Why prefix the settings `UV_CACHE_MAX_SIZE` and `UV_LOCKFILE` with `UV_` if they're new features? Makes no sense.

_flux2• 4 months ago

They are environment variables. I enjoy seeing from my large number of environment variables to which applications they belong to.

worksonmine2• 4 months ago

I know what an environment variable is, my question is why name them `UV_` instead of `FYN_`? I thought that would've been obvious for exactly the same reason you mention, it should be named for the application they belong to.

unethical_ban• 4 months ago

Facilitates drop-in migration from uv to the new tool. So if uv adopts the feature it's "just there".

lr19704• 4 months ago

Would be more logical to use FYN_ prefix

Bender2• 4 months ago

Given the telemetry, how did uv ever get approved/adopted by the open source community to begin with, or did it creep in? Why isn't it currently burning in a fire?

albinn3• 4 months ago

I don't think it is too bad, the telemetry it sends is quite rudimentary. However, would have been a good move from astral-sh to be open and explicit about it, and allow turning it off.

Ygg23• 4 months ago

Telemetry isn't bad in OSS per se. Without it, it's hard to say how an app is used and how to develop it in the future.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 4 months ago

On the contrary, OSS is precisely where this kind of spying on your users is least useful, since there's already a culture of them telling you, sometimes with code, what they need.

add-sub-mul-div• 4 months ago

Because not everyone has a knee-jerk emotional reaction to a word when that word can mean something benign aside from its typical FUD connotation.

Bender2• 4 months ago

I will always have a "knee-jerk" response to opt-out or mandatory telemetry or any other outbound connections I did not ask for being initiated automatically. In a corporate world I would have to block this and depending on what the telemetry is connecting to that could impact other outbound connections leading to contention without the org.

One of the optimal ways to do this would be to opt-in by setting an environment variable to enabled any combination of extra debugging, telemetry, stats, etc... Perhaps even different end-points using environment variables.

simonw7• 4 months ago

The telemetry they removed here isn't unique to uv, and it's not being sent back to Astral. Here's the equivalent code in pip itself: https://github.com/pypa/pip/blob/59555f49a0916c6459755d7686a...

It's providing platform information to PyPI to help track which operating systems and platforms are being used by different packages.

The result is useful graphs like these: https://pypistats.org/packages/sqlite-utils and https://pepy.tech/projects/sqlite-utils?timeRange=threeMonth...

The field that guesses if something is running in a CI environment is particularly useful, because it helps package authors tell if their package is genuinely popular or if it's just being installed in CI thousands of times a day by one heavy user who doesn't cache their requirements.

Honestly, stripping this data and then implying that it was collected by Astral/OpenAI in a creepy way is a bad look for this new fork. They should at least clarify in their documentation what the "telemetry" does so as not to make people think Astral were acting in a negative way.

Personally I think stripping the telemetry damages the Python community's ability to understand the demographics of package consumption while not having any meaningful impact on end-user privacy at all.

Here's the original issue against uv, where the feature was requested by a PyPI volunteer: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/1958

Update: I filed an issue against fyn suggesting they improve their documentation of this: https://github.com/duriantaco/fyn/issues/1

arjie• 4 months ago

These things include your OS, py version, CPU architecture, Linux distro, whether you're in CI. All baked into the User-Agent header via something called "linehaul". We ripped that out. Now it just sends fyn/0.10.13. That's it.

I imagine it's just that the User-Agent is something that we've grown accustomed to passing information in. I am fairly biased since I'd always opt-in even to popcon. I think it's useful to have such usage information.

PurpleRamen• 4 months ago

This is so useful, I'm shocked they even make a big thing out of it. And now I'm questioning whether this is even their real intention, or just a diversion?

blitzar• 4 months ago

It was really really good.

dirkc5• 4 months ago

I suspect that my normal workflows might just have evolved to route around the pain that package management can be in python (or any other ecosystem really).

In what situations are uv most useful? Is it once you install machine learning packages and it pulls in more native stuff - ie is it more popular in some circles? Is there a killer feature that I'm missing?

dec0dedab0de4• 4 months ago

UV is most useful because it is so much faster than everything else. All the other features I could do without.

dirkc5• 4 months ago

Yep, the speed is nice, I can't argue with that!

politelemon• 4 months ago

Imo, uv scripts with the dependencies in the header.

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#declaring-script-d...

dirkc5• 4 months ago

I guess that could be useful. I don't have many standalone python scripts, and those that I do have are very basic. It would be really nice if that header could include sandboxing!

simonw7• 4 months ago

If you have hundreds of different Python projects on your machine (as I do) the speed and developer experience improvements of uv make a big difference.

I love being able to cd into any folder and run "uv run pytest" without even having to think about virtual environments or package versions.

dirkc5• 4 months ago

Do you run those projects on the host system as your normal user without any isolation?

fmajid• 4 months ago

I'm worried about OpenAI enshittifying uv and ruff now they've acquired Astral, so it's good to have options.

lr19704• 4 months ago

From fyn's roadmap:

2. Centralized venv storage — keep .venvs out of your project dirs

I do not like this. virtual environments have been always associated with projects and colocated with them. Moving .venv to centralized storage recreates conda philosophy which is very different from pip/uv approach.

In any case, I am using pixi now and like it a lot.

imcritic• 4 months ago

How is pixi better than uv?

lr19704• 4 months ago

How is pixi better than uv?

pixi is a general multi-languge, multi-platform package manager. I am using it now on my new macbook neo as a homebrew _replacement_. Yes, it goes beyond python and allows you to install git, jj, fzf, cmake, compilers, pandoc, and many more.

For python, pixi uses conda-forge and PyPI as package repos and relies on uv's rattler dependency resolver. pixi is as fast as uv (it uses fast code path from uv) but goes further beyond python wheels. For detail see [0] or google it :-)

[0] https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/

nilslindemann• 4 months ago

They are all anachronisms, as they have no GUIs, just commands to be typed into a REPL.

short_sells_poo• 4 months ago

I like it a lot :D.

Virtual environments have been always associated with projects in your use case I guess.

In my use case, they almost never are. Most people in my industry have 1-2 venvs that they use across all their projects, and uv forcing it into a single project directory made it quite inconvenient and unnecessary duplication of the same sets of libraries.

I dislike conda not because of the centralized venvs, but because it's bloated, poorly engineered, slow and inconvenient to use.

At the end of the day, this gives us choice. People can use uv or they can use fyn and have both use cases covered.

lr19704• 4 months ago

and uv forcing it into a single project directory made it quite inconvenient and unnecessary duplication of the same sets of libraries.

Actually, uv intelligently uses hardlinks or reflinks to avoid file duplication. On the surface, venvs in different projects are duplicate, but in reality they reference the same files in the uv's cache.

BTW, pixi does the same. And `pixi global` allows you to create global environments in central location if you prefer this workflow.

EDIT: I forgot to mention an elephant in the room. With agentic AI coding you do want all your dependencies to be under your project root. AI agents run in sandboxes and I do not want to give them extra permissions pocking around in my entire storage. I start an agent in the project root and all my code and .venv are there. This provides sense of locality to the agent. They only need to pock around under the project root and nowhere else.

clickety_clack• 4 months ago

Do you only work on projects individually? Without project-specific environments I don’t know how you could share code with someone else without frequent breakages.

Levitating• 4 months ago

It has been working fine for build systems like cargo.

simonw7• 4 months ago

Here's where that feature was (and is still being) discussed in the uv repo: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/1495

It's been open for two years but it looks like there's a PR in active development for it right now: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/pull/18214

dec0dedab0de4• 4 months ago

thats my biggest problem with uv, i liked the way pipenv did it much better. I want to be able to use find and recursive grep without worrying that libraries are in my project directory.

uv is just so fast that i deal with it.

valicord• 4 months ago

rg/fd respect gitignore automatically which solves this problem

santiagobasulto• 4 months ago

Sometimes I want the venvs to be in a centralized location, and just do:

UV_PROJECT_ENVIRONMENT=$HOME/.virtualenvs/{env-name} uv {command}

skeledrew2• 4 months ago

I like it. Enjoyed having it with Conda, was sorry when it was lost with uv. Been a pain to search my projects and have irrelevant results that I then have to filter. Or to remember to filter in the first place. The venvs may be associated with the projects, but they're just extraneous clutter unless there's actually something to be done directly on them, which is very rare.

WhyNotHugo• 4 months ago

Pip doesn’t have any philosophy here. It doesn’t manage your virtualenv at all, and definitely doesn’t suggest installing dependencies into a working directory.

Putting the venv in the project repository is a mess; it mixes a bunch of third party code and artifacts into the current workspace. It also makes cleaning disk space a pain, since virtualenvs end up littered all over the place. And every time you “git clean” you have to bootstrap all over again.

Perhaps a flag to control this might be a good fit, but honestly, I always found uv’s workflow here super annoying.

mixmastamyk• 4 months ago

Disagree—better to have space allocated in each project where they can be easily deleted at once. Rather than half hidden in your home folder somewhere with random names and forgotten about.

If for some rare reason you wanted to delete all venvs, a find command is easy enough to write.

0cf8612b2e1e• 4 months ago

One problem I have on my work machine is that it will do a blind backup of project directories. Useless .venv structure with thousands of files completely trashes the backup process. Having at least the flexibility to push the .venv to a cache location is useful. There was (is?) a uv issue about this similar use case (eg having a Dropbox/Onedrive monitored folder).

jcattle2• 4 months ago

Nah sorry, so far 4 of the 9 commit messages in that fork are "cleanup".

And the first two commits are "new fork" and "fork", where "new fork" is a nice (+28204 -39206) commit and "fork" is a cheeky (+23971 -23921) commit.

I think I'm good. And I would question the judgement of anyone jumping on this fork.

emil-lp• 4 months ago

Commit messages say a lot about people.

jcattle2• 4 months ago

They really do. Let me cite another one from the repo:

"fix: updated readme. sorry was so tired i accidentally mass replaced uv with fyn for all"

nikolay• 4 months ago

Branch names do, too!

bjornarv• 4 months ago

creator is definitely just jumping on this for some clout

albinn3• 4 months ago

I agree, I like some of the directions the fork would go and dislike some. The apparent, fork, publish on HN, then change (and the change showing not a lot of understanding) makes me throughly question the legitimacy and long term stability of it.

dec0dedab0de4• 4 months ago

absolutely, but i like the spirit behind it. Hopefully we get a few more and one of them pulls ahead.

ricardobeat• 4 months ago

based on that, the project description is entirely a lie - there are no bugfixes, new features, or even the removed telemetry here ?

skeledrew2• 4 months ago

Will be switching to this, or another fork, soon as I see decent stability.

e10v_me• 4 months ago

I'm surprised by how many people has fallen for that. I also wonder how many of them are the author's friends or bots.

tfrancisl3• 4 months ago

Super tenuous to claim that the info being sent to package indices constitutes "telemetry". Very clear this is a clout chaser.

aguyonhn• 4 months ago

non-solution to a non-problem

Fyn: An uv fork with new features, bug fixes, stripped telemetry

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