On 18 July 2016 at 17:33, Steve Dower <steve.dower@python.org> wrote:
Some comments below.
Awesome, thanks! Posted a pull request at https://github.com/python/peps/pull/59 for ease of diff reading, and some commentary below (with aggressive snipping).
Thanks - I'll do a proper review of that, but just wanted to make a few comments here.
virtualenv would be a great example to use. My thinking was that the Tag should be appropriate here (perhaps with the Company to disambiguate when necessary), and that is now explicit.
Anaconda currently has "Anaconda_4.1.1_64-bit" as their tag, which would not be convenient, so an explicit suggestion here would help ensure this is useful.
Yeah, that's not a useful value for this use case. What I'm thinking of is that currently a number of projects (for example, virtualenv, tox, and a personal Powershell wrapper I have round virtualenv) do this registry introspection exercise, purely to provide a "more convenient" way of specifying a Python version than giving the full path to the interpreter. Unix users have versioned executables, so -p python3.5 works fine, but Windows users don't have that. So my idea is "something as easy to remember as python3.5". But having said this, we're talking about a theoretical extension to existing functionality, that probably has marginal utility at best, so I don't want to get hung up on details here.
Snipped most of the details because I agree it's unsatisfying right now, but I disagree with enough of the counterproposal that it was getting to be messy commenting on each bit.
I take your points here. What I was trying to avoid (because I've encountered it myself) is having to actually *run* the Python interpreter to extract this information. Unix code does this freely, because running subprocesses is so cheap there, but starting up a load of processes on Windows is a non-trivial cost. But again, this is in the area of "potential use cases" rather than "we need it now", so I'm OK with deferring the question if you're uncertain. OK, that's enough off-the-cuff responses. I'll find some time to review your PR (probably tomorrow) and comment there. Paul