[Python-Dev] PEP 370 - per-user scripts directory on Windows

[Paul Moore]

On 12 February 2015 at 08:05, Thomas Heller <theller at ctypes.org> wrote:
> Maybe I'm more or less alone with the way I work, but I don't like
> python.exe on my PATH (and py.exe alloes me to do this).
> I start python scripts from the command line either with 'script.py'
> or 'py -3.4 script.py' or 'py -2.7 script.py'.

This is how I worked for a long time after py.exe became available.
But then I discovered virtualenv, and started using that, and needing
to use 2 completely different command sets for "when I'm in a
virtualenv" vs "when I'm not" became completely unusable.

If py.exe detected when the environment variable VIRTUAL_ENV was set,
and used that virtualenv as the default Python rather than the
"system" python it normally used, this would be perfect.

I think I'll write a PEP for this. Do people think it's a reasonable idea?

(On that note, is there any relationship between the py.exe shipped
with Python and the standalone version Vinay used to maintain but
which now appears to be hosted at
https://bitbucket.org/pypa/pylauncher? The two seem to be different,
for example the pypa version registers pyz/pyzw extensions).

Paul