[Python-Dev] PEP 405 (Python Virtual Environments) and Windows script support

[Nick Coghlan]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Carl Meyer <carl at oddbird.net> wrote:
> On 05/28/2012 04:24 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>> It would have been better if the issue of script management on Windows
>> had been raised in PEP 405 itself - I likely would have declared PEP
>> 397 a dependency *before* accepting it (even if that meant the feature
>> missed the alpha 4 deadline and first appeared in beta 1, or
>> potentially even missed 3.3 altogether).
>>
>> However, I'm not going to withdraw the acceptance of the PEP over this
>> - while I would have made a different decision at the time given the
>> additional information (due to the general preference to treat Windows
>> as a first class deployment target), I think reversing my decision now
>> would make the situation worse rather than better.
>
> I think it's unfortunate that this issue (which is
> http://bugs.python.org/issue12394) has become entangled with PEP 405 at
> all, since AFAICT it is entirely orthogonal. This is a
> distutils2/packaging issue regarding how scripts are installed on
> Windows. It happens to be relevant when trying to install things into a
> PEP 405 venv on Windows, but it applies to a non-virtual Python
> installation on Windows every bit as much as it applies to a PEP 405
> environment. In an earlier discussion with Vinay I thought we had agreed
> that it was an orthogonal issue and that this proposed patch for it
> would be removed from the PEP 405 reference implementation before it was
> merged to CPython trunk; I think that would have been preferable.
>
> This is why there is no mention of the issue in PEP 405 - it doesn't
> belong there, because it is not related.

Ah, thanks for the clarification.

In that case: Vinay, please revert everything from the pyvenv commit
that was actually related to issue #12394 rather than being part of
the PEP 405 implementation. As Carl says, it's an unrelated change
that needs to be discussed separately.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia