With all the hype surrounding Python it’s easy to forget that it’s a really old language. And, in my opinion, the leadership is a bit of a mess so there hasn’t been any concerted effort on standardizing tooling.

Some unsolicited advice from somebody who is used more refined build environments but is doing a lot of Python these days:

The whole venv thing isn’t too bad once you get the hang of it. But be prepared for people to tell you that you’re using the wrong venv for reasons you’ll never quit understand or likely need to care about. Just use the bundled “python -m venv venv” and you’ll be fine despite other “better” alternatives. It’s bundled so it’s always available to you. And feel free to just drop/recreate your venv whenever you like or need. They’re ephemeral and pretty large once you’ve installed a lot of things.

Use “pipx” to install python applications you want to use as programs rather than libraries. It creates and manages venvs for them so you don’t get library conflicts. Something like “pip-tools” for example (pipx install pip-tools).

Use “pyenv” to manage installed python versions - it’s a bit like “sdkman” for the JVM ecosystem and makes it easy to deal with the “specific versions of python” stuff.

For dependencies for an app - I just create a requirements.txt and “pip install -r requirements.txt” for the most part… Though I should use one of the 80 better ways to do it because they can help with updating versions automatically. Those tools mostly also just spit out a requirements.txt in the end so it’s pretty easy to migrate to them. pip-tools is what my team is moving towards and it seems a reasonable option. YMMV.