[Python-Dev] Distutils and Distribute roadmap (and some words on Virtualenv, Pip) (original) (raw)

Masklinn masklinn at masklinn.net
Thu Oct 8 18:35:45 CEST 2009

On 8 Oct 2009, at 18:17 , Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

This is not at all how I use virtualenv. For me virtualenv is a sandbox so that I don't have to become root whenever I need to install a Python package for testing purposes This is needing to install multiple versions and use the newly installed version for testing. No it's not. It's keeping the python package being tested out of the
system's or user's site-package because it's potentially unstable or
unneeded. It provides a trivial way of removing the package to get
rid of it: delete the virtualenv. No trace anywhere that the package
was ever installed, no impact on the system (apart from the potential
side-effects of executing the system).

The issue here isn't "multiple installed packages", it will more than
likely be the only version of itself: note that it's a package being
tested, not an upgrade being tested.

The issues solved are:

and to allow me to hop between sets of installed Python packages while developing on multiple Python projects. This is the ability to install multiple versions and specify different versions for different projects you're working on. No, this is the ability to not needlessly clutter site-packages, keep
them clean, tight, focused; and the ability to keep a project's
environment (such as its dependencies) clear and repeatable. Nowhere
was it indicated that multiple versions were involved.

Both of those might imply issues of multiple versions concurrently
installed on the system, and virtualenv would incidentally solve these
issues, but these issues are not the core of either use case.
They're at best peripheral and potential.

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