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

[David Townshend]

>
> The default for npm is that your package dir is attached directly to the
> project. You can get more flexibility by setting an environment variable or
> creating a symlink, but normally you don't. It has about the same
> flexibility as virtualenvwrapper, with about the same amount of effort. So
> if virtualenvwrapper isn't flexible enough for you, my guess is that your
> take on npm won't be flexible enough either, it'll just come preconfigured
> for your own idiosyncratic use and everyone else will have to adjust...
>

You have a point.  Maybe lack of flexibility is not actually the issue -
it's too much flexibility.  The problem that I have with virtualenv is that
it requires quite a bit of configuration and a great deal of awareness by
the user of what is going on and how things are configured.  As stated on
it's home page While there is nothing specifically wrong with this, I
usually just want a way to do something in a venv without thinking too much
about where it is or when or how to activate it.  If you've had a look at
the details of the sort of tool I'm proposing, it is completely
transparent.  Perhaps the preconfiguration is just to my own
idiosyncrasies, but if it serves its use 90% of the time then maybe that is
good enough.

Some of what I'm proposing could be incorporated in to pip (i.e. better
requirements) and some could possibly be incorporated into
virtualenvwrapper (although I still think that my proposal for handling
venvs is just too different from that of virtualenvwrapper to be worth
pursuing that course), but one of the main aims is to merge it all into one
tool that manages both the venv and the requirements.

I'm quite sure that this proposal is not going to accepted without a trial
period on pypi, so maybe that will be the test of whether this is useful.

Is this the right place for this, or would distutils-sig be better?
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