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Rewrite resolver docs (#5723)
This PR rewrites the resolver concept and adds a resolver internals page targeted at power users. The new resolution concept documentation has three parts: * An introduction for people how never heard of "resolution" before, and a motivating example what it does. I've also shoved the part about equally valid resolutions in there. * Features you commonly use: Non-universal vs. universal resolution, lowest resolution amd pre-releases. * Expert features, we don't advertise them, you'll only need them in complex cases when you already know and i kept them to the reference points you need in this case: Constraints, overrides and exclude-newer. I intentionally didn't lay out any detail of the resolution itself, the idea is that users get a vague sense of "uv has to select fitting versions", but then they learn the options they have to use and some common failure points without ever coming near SAT or even graphs. The resolution internals reference page is targeted at power users who need to understand what is going on behind the scenes. It assumes ample prior knowledge and exists to explain the uv-specific behaviors for someone who already understands dependency resolution conceptually and has interacted with their dependency tree before. I had a section on the lockfile but removed it because it found the lockfile to be too self-documenting. I haven't touched the readme. Closes #5603 Closes #5238 Closes #5237 --------- Co-authored-by: Zanie Blue <contact@zanie.dev>
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# Resolution internals
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This page explains some of the internal workings of uv, its resolver and the lockfile. For using uv,
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see [Resolution](../concepts/resolution.md).
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## Dependency resolution with PubGrub
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If you look into a textbook, it will tell you that finding a set of version to install from a given
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set of requirements is equivalent to the
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[SAT problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem) and thereby NP-complete,
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i.e., in the worst case you have to try all possible combinations of all versions of all packages
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and there are no general fast algorithms. In practice, this is fairly misleading for a number of
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reasons:
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- The slowest part of uv is loading package and version metadata, even if it's cached.
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- Certain solution are more preferable than others, for example we generally want to use latest
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versions.
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- Requirements follow lots of patterns: We use continuous versions ranges and not arbitrary boolean
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inclusion/exclusions of versions, adjacent release have the same or similar requirements, etc.
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- For the majority of resolutions, we wouldn't even need to backtrack, just picking versions
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iteratively is sufficient. If we have preferences from a previous resolution we often barely need
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to anything at all.
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- We don't just need either a solution or a message that there is no solution (like for SAT), we
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need an understandable error trace that tell you which packages are involved in away to allows you
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to remove the conflict.
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uv uses [pubgrub-rs](https://github.com/pubgrub-rs/pubgrub), the Rust implementation of
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[PubGrub](https://nex3.medium.com/pubgrub-2fb6470504f), an incremental version solver. PubGrub in uv
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works in the following steps:
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- We have a partial solution that tells us for which packages we already picked versions and for
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which we still need to decide.
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- From the undecided packages we pick the one with the highest priority. Package with URLs
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(including file, git, etc.) have the highest priority, then those with more exact specifiers (such
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as `==`), then those with less strict specifiers. Inside each category, we order packages by when
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we first saw them, making the resolution deterministic.
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- For that package with the highest priority, pick a version that works with all specifiers from the
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packages with versions in the partial solution and that is not yet marked as incompatible. We
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prefer versions from a lockfile (`uv.lock` or `-o requirements.txt`) and installed versions, then
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we go from highest to lowest (unless you changed the resolution mode). You can see this happening
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by the `Selecting ...` messages in `uv lock -v`.
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- Add all requirements of this version to pubgrub. Start prefetching their metadata in the
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background.
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- Now we either we repeat this process with the next package or we have a conflict. Let's say we
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pick picked, among other packages, `a` 2 and then `b` 2, and those have requirements `a 2 -> c 1`
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and `b 2 -> c 2`. When trying to pick a version for `c`, we see there is no version we can pick.
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Using its internal incompatibilities store, PubGrub traces this back to `a 2` and `b 2` and adds
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an incompatibility for `{a 2, b 2}`, meaning when either is picked we can't select the other. We
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restore the state with `a` 2 before picking `b` 2 with the new learned incompatibility and pick a
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new version for `b`.
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Eventually, we either have picked compatible versions for all packages and get a successful
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resolution, or we get an incompatibility for the virtual root package, that is whatever versions of
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the root dependencies and their transitive dependencies we'd pick, we'll always get a conflict. From
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the incompatibilities in PubGrub, we can trace which packages were involved and format an error
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message. For more details on the PubGrub algorithm, see
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[Internals of the PubGrub algorithm](https://pubgrub-rs-guide.pages.dev/internals/intro).
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## Forking
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Python historically didn't have backtracking version resolution, and even with version resolution,
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it was usually limited to single environment, which one specific architecture, operating system,
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python version and python implementation. Some packages use contradictory requirements for different
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environments, something like:
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```text
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numpy>=2,<3 ; python_version >= "3.11"
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numpy>=1.16,<2 ; python_version < "3.11"
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```
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Since Python only allows one version package, just version resolution would error here. Inspired by
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[poetry](https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry), we instead use forking: Whenever there are
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multiple requirements with different for one package name in the requirements of a package, we split
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the resolution around these requirements. In this case, we take our partial solution and then once
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solve the rest for `python_version >= "3.11"` and once for `python_version < "3.11"`. If some
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markers overlap or are missing a part of the marker space, we add additional forks. There can be
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more than 2 forks per package and we nest forks. You can see this in the log of `uv lock -v` by
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looking for `Splitting resolution on ...`, `Solving split ... (requires-python: ...)` and
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`Split ... resolution took ...`.
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One problem is that where and how we split is dependent on the order we see packages, which is in
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turn dependent on the preference you get e.g. from `uv.lock`. So it can happen that we solve your
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requirements with specific forks, write this to the lockfile, and when you call `uv lock` again,
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we'd do a different resolution even if nothing changed because the preferences cause us to use
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different fork points. To avoid this we write the `environment-markers` of each fork and each
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package that diverges between forks to the lockfile. When doing a new resolution, we start with the
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forks from the lockfile and use fork-dependent preference (from the `environment-markers` on each
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package) to keep the resolution stable. When requirements change, we may introduce new forks from
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the saved forks. We also merge forks with identical packages to keep the number of forks low.
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## Requires-python
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To ensure that a resolution with `requires-python = ">=3.9"` can actually be installed for all those
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python versions, uv requires that all dependency support at least that python version. We reject
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package versions that declare e.g. `requires-python = ">=3.10"` because we already know that a
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resolution with that version can't be installed on Python 3.9, while the user explicitly requested
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including 3.9. For simplicity and forward compatibility, we do however only consider lower bounds
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for requires-python. If a dependency declares `requires-python = ">=3.8,<4"`, we don't want to
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propagate that `<4` marker.
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## Wheel tags
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While our resolution is universal with respect to requirement markers, this doesn't extend to wheel
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tags. Wheel tags can encode Python version, Python interpreter, operating system and architecture,
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e.g. `torch-2.4.0-cp312-cp312-manylinux2014_aarch64.whl` is only compatible with CPython 3.12 on
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arm64 Linux with glibc >= 2.17 (the manylinux2014 policy), while `tqdm-4.66.4-py3-none-any.whl`
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works with all Python 3 versions and interpreters on any operating system and architecture. Most
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projects have a (universally compatible) source distribution we can fall back to when we try to
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install a package version and there is no compatible wheel, but some, such as `torch`, don't have a
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source distribution. In this case an installation on e.g. Python 3.13 or an uncommon operating
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system or architecture will fail with a message about a missing matching wheel.
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