uv venv --seed now also installs packaging

[cwiede]

Yesterday a new version of the wheel package was released with a dependency on the packaging package. This means that uv venv --seed will now also install packaging. Since our internal workflow for creating the environments was not expecting this (and obviously it is also not stated in uv's documentation), we got some failures.

In uv's documentation, this is stated:

Install seed packages (one or more of: pip, setuptools, and wheel) into the virtual environment [env: UV_VENV_SEED=]

Note that setuptools and wheel are not included in Python 3.12+ environments.

So this is not valid anymore, since packaging might be installed as well.

[zanieb]

Hm, I'm not sure it feels important for us to note that wheel depends on packaging there? Any of those packages could have dependencies which change — uv is just resolving the requirements from the top-level expected packages?

[cwiede]

Yes I agree. I don't really see this as an issue of uv itself.

But maybe a hint could be added to the documentation that there might be more than the listed packages installed in the venv; since the docs now state that it will not be more than the 3 packages listed.

[konstin]

I'm kinda surprised that change, it seems we also have diverged from virtualenv in how we handle seed packages:

$ for i in {8..14}; do echo && echo "# Python 3.$i" && uvx virtualenv -p "3.$i" .venv -q && .venv/bin/pip list; done

# Python 3.8
Package    Version
---------- -------
pip        25.0.1
setuptools 75.3.3
wheel      0.45.1

# Python 3.9
Package    Version
---------- -------
pip        25.3
setuptools 80.10.2

# Python 3.10
Package    Version
---------- -------
pip        25.3
setuptools 80.10.2

# Python 3.11
Package    Version
---------- -------
pip        25.3
setuptools 80.10.2

# Python 3.12
Package Version
------- -------
pip     25.3

# Python 3.13
Package Version
------- -------
pip     25.3

# Python 3.14
Package Version
------- -------
pip     25.3

We also diverged for Python itself:

$ for i in {8..14}; do echo && rm -rf .venv && echo "# Python 3.$i" && python3.$i -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/python --version && .venv/bin/pip list; done

# Python 3.8
Python 3.8.18
Package    Version
---------- -------
pip        23.0.1
setuptools 56.0.0
WARNING: There was an error checking the latest version of pip.

# Python 3.9
Python 3.9.18
Package    Version
---------- -------
pip        23.0.1
setuptools 58.1.0
WARNING: There was an error checking the latest version of pip.

# Python 3.10
Python 3.10.14
Package    Version
---------- -------
pip        23.0.1
setuptools 65.5.0
WARNING: There was an error checking the latest version of pip.

# Python 3.11
Python 3.11.14
Package    Version
---------- -------
pip        24.0
setuptools 79.0.1

[notice] A new release of pip is available: 24.0 -> 25.3
[notice] To update, run: python3.11 -m pip install --upgrade pip

# Python 3.12
Python 3.12.12
Package Version
------- -------
pip     25.0.1

# Python 3.13
Python 3.13.11
Package Version
------- -------
pip     25.3

# Python 3.14
Python 3.14.2
Package Version
------- -------
pip     25.3

We should consider updating both our package set and our documentation to align better with upstream.