[Python-ideas] npm-style venv-aware launcher

[Alexander Walters]

You might want to shoot this over to the distutils-sig mailing list.

On 5/31/2015 03:16, David Townshend wrote:
> Pip and venv have done a lot to improve the accessibility and ease of 
> installing python packages, but I believe there is still a lot of room 
> for improvement.  I only realised how cumbersome I find working with 
> python packages when I recently spent a lot of time on a javascript 
> project using npm.  A bit of googling and I found several articles 
> discussing pip, venv and npm, and all of them seemed to say the same 
> thing, i.e. pip/venv could learn a lot from npm.
>
> My proposal revolves around two issues:
>
>  1. Setting up and working with virtual environments can be onerous. 
>     Creating one is easy enough, but using them means remembering to
>     run `source activate` every time, which also means remembering
>     which venv is used for which project.  Not a major issue, but
>     still and annoyance.
>  2. Managing lists of required packages is not nearly as easy as in
>     npm since these is no equivalent to `npm install --save ...`.  The
>     best that pip offers is `pip freeze`. Howevere, using that is a)
>     an extra step to remember and b) includes all implied dependencies
>     which is not ideal.
>
> My proposal is to use a similar model to npm, where each project has a 
> `venvrc` file which lets python-related tools know which environment 
> to use.  In order to showcase the sort of funcionality I'm proposing, 
> I've created a basic example on github 
> (https://github.com/aquavitae/pyle). This is currently py3.4 on linux 
> only and very pre-alpha. Once I've added a few more features that I 
> have in mind (e.g. multiple venvs) I'll add it to pypi and if there is 
> sufficient interest I'd be happy to write up a PEP for getting it into 
> the stdlib.
>
> Does this seem like the sort of tool that would be useful in the stdlib?
>
> Regards
>
> David
>
>
>
>
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