[Python-Dev] draft PEP: virtual environments

[Vinay Sajip]

Antoine Pitrou <solipsis <at> pitrou.net> writes:

> Isn't that overengineered? We're talking about a couple of files.

We're not talking about a lot of code to do this, either - just the interface to
the existing code (which is needed anyway to install the minimal scripts in the
venv).

> It's not even obvious that third-party tools will want to modify them,
> instead of writing their own (if the venv API is stable, it should be
> relatively easy).

Well, virtualenvwrapper is pretty popular addon to virtualenv which delivers
additional scripts, even though virtualenv already supplies more scripts than
we're proposing to do in the stdlib.

Example use cases for such scripts might be things like environment manipulation
when environments are activated/deactivated (e.g. for LD_LIBRARY_PATH) - we
can't always predict all the different needs that arise, so I'm just leaving the
door open to third parties to be able to do what they need.

> I don't know why it's neater. After all, we install .py files in their
> original form, not in a zipfile (even though Python supports the
> latter).

Perhaps it's a matter of taste. The files we're talking about are actually data
in the context we're discussing.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip