On 17 December 2016 at 06:40, Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph@twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
On Dec 16, 2016, at 5:51 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth@gmail.com> wrote:
One possibility to consider is that virtualenv itself is a bad idea. Why should the Python interpreter executable, rather than the program being run, determine the set of packages that is available for import? It is confusing and inconvenient to have to deal with environments at all. Yes, even if you are using a helper. Maybe there can be a better way to manage dependencies that is not completely disjoint from setup.py.

I can see why you'd say that, but I disagree.  I think the name "virtualenv" is really confusing, but the general idea of "it's the interpreter and not the app" is a very powerful concept because you can run a REPL (or a notebook, or a debugger, or a doc generator, or any other dev tool) in the same context as your application code, without actually loading or executing any specific thing from your application code.  Virtualenv also lets you easily control which Python version or interpreter (hello, pypy!) is being used in each context.

I'll also note that VSCode's Python plugin will find virtual environments that are located inside the project directory by default. That approach of "the virtualenv is inside the project directory" is probably a decent pattern to recommend as a default, since it aligns with the way a lot of IDEs (including VSCode itself) already work. When you use that model, rather than being something you have to think about explicitly, the "Python virtual environment" just becomes an implementation detail of how the IDE manages your application dependencies, with the added bonus that *if you want to*, you can re-use that environment independently of both the application *and* the IDE.

And while I personally prefer to keep the notion of "project" and "environment" more explicitly separate (i.e. I have an M:N mapping between a collection of virtualenvs centrally managed with vex and the various projects in my devel, fedoradevel and rhdevel folders, hence [1]), I believe that level of complexity in a local dev setup isn't really normal even for experienced programmers, let alone folks that are still early in the learning process.

Cheers,
Nick.

[1] https://github.com/DonJayamanne/pythonVSCode/issues/569

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Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan@gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia