[Python-ideas] pythonv / Python path

[Brett Cannon]

On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 15:16, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 5:11 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 14:33, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
>> > On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Is this email meant to simply point out the existence of pythonv, or
>> >> to start a conversation about whether something should be tweaked in
>> >> Python so as to make pythonv/virtualenv easier to implement/use?
>> >
>> > Both?  I have felt guilty for not following up on what Larry did, so
>> > this is
>> > my other-people-should-think-about-this-too email.
>> >
>> >>
>> >> If it's the latter then let's have the conversation! This was brought
>> >> up at the PyCon US 2010 language summit and the consensus was that
>> >> modifying Python to make something like virtualenv or pythonv easier
>> >> to implement is completely acceptable and something worth doing.
>> >
>> > OK, sure!  Mostly it's about changing site.py.
>>
>> OK, what exactly needs to change?
>
> Well, add a notion of "prefixes", where the system sys.prefix is one item,
> but the environment location is the "active" sys.prefix.  Then most of the
> site.py changes can follow logically from that (whatever you do for the one
> prefix, do for all prefixes).  Then there's a matter of using an
> environmental variable to add a new prefix (or multiple prefixes --
> inheritable virtualenvs, if virtualenv allowed such a thing).  In the
> pythonv implementation it sets that variable, and site.py deletes that
> variable (it could be a command-line switch, that's just slightly hard to
> implement -- but it's not intended as an inheritable attribute of the
> execution environment like PYTHONPATH).

OK, so it sounds like site.py would just need a restructuring. That's
sounds like just a technical challenge and not a
backwards-compatibility one. Am I right?

>
>> >  The pythonv executable is
>> > itself very simple, just a shim to make #! easier.
>>
>> But that's in C, though, right? What exactly does it do? It would be
>> best to make it if the shim can be in Python so that other VMs can
>> work with it.
>
> #! doesn't work with a Python target, otherwise it would be easy to
> implement in Python.  #! is awful.

As in a #! can't target a Python script that has been chmod'ed to be executable?