[Distutils] early preview of pythonv

Jim Fulton jim at zope.com
Wed Mar 16 13:00:21 CET 2011


On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 4:31 AM, Carl Meyer <carl at oddbird.net> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Here at PyCon we've had some discussion about building a
> virtualenv-alike into Python core for Python 3.3. The goal is to improve
> on virtualenv by providing something that does what virtualenv does
> without requiring a copied Python binary, symlinked/copied parts of the
> standard library, or a forked site.py.
>
> (I'm not entirely sure that distutils-sig is the right venue for
> discussing this, but it's the closest I know of and was recommended by
> others in our conversations here; if there's a better place please let
> me know; maybe python-ideas? The patch as is stands does affect
> sysconfig.py, which is used more by distutils than anything else.)
>
> The idea we discussed is to add to Python's built-in site.py the ability
> to set paths up for a virtual environment, triggered by certain
> environment variables. Then, for convenience, there'll be a small
> executable which can be placed in the "bin/" directory of a virtual
> environment and knows how to set up these environment variables and then
> exec() the system Python binary.
>
> Larry Hastings had already created this wrapper executable at last
> year's PyCon, and tonight I made the necessary modifications to site.py
> and sysconfig.py to support it on the Python side. The early prototype
> is now working well (at least on Linux; I think it ought to work on OS
> X, and should work partially on Windows as well), and I'd welcome review
> and comment: https://bitbucket.org/carljm/cpythonv  Look in
> Tools/pythonv/README.rst for instructions.
>
> This is an early prototype and will certainly require refinement (not to
> mention most likely a PEP, at some point). Please try it out and let me
> know if it works for you!

Carl,

Thanks for posting this.  I'm very hopeful that buildout can use this
same mechanism to get the isolation it needs.  I would really
appreciate it if buildout users who care about this would test it with
buildout.  In particular, I know of 2 basic use cases:

- Get complete isolation from local additions relative to the standard
  Python distribution.

- Have the ability to cherry pick some local additions while having
  isolation from the rest. (Gary and Ubuntu, I'm looking at you.)

Please, let's make sure this mechanism is enough. To raise the stakes
a bit, when this mechanism is available, presumably in Python 3.3, I
plan to use it exclusively to provide isolation in buildout.

Jim

--
Jim Fulton
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfulton


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