[Python-ideas] Syntax to import modules before running command from the command line

[Nick Coghlan]

On 10 January 2018 at 18:30, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10 January 2018 at 02:39, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> For the coverage.py use case, an environment-based solution is also
>> genuinely helpful, since you typically can't modify subprocess
>> invocations just because the software is being tested. At the moment,
>> there are approaches that rely on using either `sitecustomize` or
>> `*.pth` files, but being able to write `PYTHONRUNFIRST="import
>> coverage; coverage.process_startup()"` would be a fair bit clearer
>> about what was actually going on.
>
> It's worth remembering that Windows doesn't have the equivalent of the
> Unix "VAR=xxx prog arg arg" syntax for one-time setting of an
> environment variable, so environment variable based solutions are
> strictly less useful than command line arguments. That's one reason I
> prefer -C over PYTHONRUNFIRST.

The proposal is to offer both, not an either/or, but the idea isn't
that folks would need to set the environment variable directly - it's
that coverage.py itself (or a test runner) would set it so that
subprocesses were captured in addition to the directly executed
module.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia