[Distutils] Need help with a usecase

[Carl Meyer]

Hi Reinout,

On 04/19/2011 02:46 AM, Reinout van Rees wrote:
> The one thing that, to me, still is a big advantage of buildout over
> virtualenv in cases like this: you can just run the scripts in bin/*
> as-is. You do not need to activate the virtualenv beforehand.

There are good reasons why one might prefer buildout over virtualenv,
but this is not one of them ;-) A virtualenv also has a bin/ directory
with scripts in it (including the interpreter, bin/python). You can run
any of those scripts directly (with no activation) and they will run
within the virtualenv.

Activation is a shell convenience that is entirely unnecessary to the
operation of virtualenv. All it does is put the virtualenv's bin/
directory first on your $PATH, so its scripts will take priority over
globally-installed scripts.

Carl