Make pixi easy to use

[MarcSkovMadsen]

Problem description

I'm a contributor to HoloViz Panel. We recently switched to pixi. pixi is much better than the setup we had before as that was slow and almost impossible to replicate for a new developer. But we've also discussed in the team that no contributor uses pixi for development even though we document it in our developer guide. It just provides a documentable way to install the project and it works very well for ci/cd.

We all choose to just pip install -e . or uv pip install -e . locally and manually add missing dependencies if needed as that comes with much less friction.

For me personally there are so many friction points with pixi compared to uv. We are now also starting to use pixi for a Copier template. You can follow my friction here: panel-extensions/copier-template-panel-extension#4. I hope it can inspire to make pixi a lot easier to use for developers.

[ruben-arts]

I and the team very much appreciate you sharing your friction! Of-course want to fix most of this as we build pixi specifically as a developer-first tool!

We're in the works of figuring out if some of our design decisions should be revisited as our user group grows and there use-cases grow. Let me create a concrete list of possible changes we could do to fix your frictions! I believe some of them are already in issues so I'll create a composed list of that that we could use to focus our work.

[ruben-arts]

Here is a response to the full issue.

Installation

Pixi currently is not available on PyPI as there wasn't a big enough request for it yet. We've recently got more questions regarding it so we think it's time to have it on there. A big refactor of our CI is currently being worked on which should make this addition easier too.
You re-triggered the idea again to install pixi into a "normal" bin folder: issue

System Resource overload

@baszalmstra has done a deepdive into the issue and found some issues in the solver related to the use of too much memory. Here are two pr's related to fixing that: mamba-org/resolvo#85 mamba-org/resolvo#37. These are both not in yet but work is on the way to improve this. Meanwhile there are two things to help with this problem, as mentioned in #2458 (comment) you can help the solver with giving it some more constraints on the solve space for now. Or you can set the --concurrent-solves or concurrency config to something lower which makes pixi only run one solve at a time. Resulting in less system resources used.

Autocompletion script

We've change the script to not be an echo and just something the user has to add themself to avoid bad script executions https://pixi.sh/dev/#autocompletion

Open VSX Registry

It was just released there by the maintainer: @jjjermiah 🎉 https://open-vsx.org/extension/jjjermiah/pixi-vscode

Always resolving all environments

We're thinking and looking into how we can make the burden of solving less of an issue for projects with high amount of environments, for this we haven't found a good direction yet, but know it's on our mind!

We hope some of these changes will help with your experience and start making you like pixi more .