Summary

Hi folks! Been slowly migrating to use uv's pip-compile compatibility and stumbled across a divergence in behavior when passing both --upgrade (upgrade all packages) and --upgrade-package={pkg}{constraint} (upgrade package {pkg}, subject to {constraint}).

jazzband's pip-compile currently does it's best to respect the intention of both flags -- it considers the additional constraint and maximizes packages upgrades while still satisfying the constraint. It appears that uv simply ignores any additional constraints when alongside --upgrade.

FROM --platform=linux/amd64 ghcr.io/astral-sh/uv:0.10.0-debian-slim

WORKDIR /mre

RUN uv venv --quiet && uv pip install --quiet 'pip-tools==7.5.2' 'pip<26'
RUN echo "requests" > requirements.in && \
  echo "requests==2.28.0" > requirements-pipcompile.txt && \
  echo "requests==2.28.0" > requirements-uv.txt

# pip-compile
RUN .venv/bin/pip-compile --quiet requirements.in -o requirements-pipcompile.txt \
    --upgrade --upgrade-package 'requests<2.30.0' && \
  echo "requests version with pip-compile:" && \
  grep "^requests==" requirements-pipcompile.txt

# uv
RUN uv pip compile --quiet requirements.in -o requirements-uv.txt \
    --upgrade --upgrade-package 'requests<2.30.0' && \
  echo "requests version with uv pip compile:" && \
  grep "^requests==" requirements-uv.txt

$ docker build -f ./Dockerfile . --progress=plain --no-cache
...

#8 6.363 requests version with pip-compile:
#8 6.364 requests==2.29.0

...
#9 1.755 requests version with uv pip compile:
#9 1.756 requests==2.32.5

I was curious, so I peeked through the code and found this TODO that seems pertinent.

From my understanding, we DO want uv's pip-compile to be a drop in replacement, so I think it fair to consider this a bug worth fixing! I've been working on a patch that should handle this case (as well as a few related situations with --no-upgrade etc).. I'll link to that from here, if that's ok!

Platform

Ubuntu 24.04 (x84_64), though think this is OS, architecture independent

Version

uv 0.10.7

Python version

Python 3.14.0