[Python-Dev] PEP 405 (built-in virtualenv) status (original) (raw)

Carl Meyer carl at oddbird.net
Mon Jun 4 16:11:44 CEST 2012

Hello Christian,

On 06/03/2012 03:56 PM, Éric Araujo wrote:

Le 02/06/2012 12:59, Christian Tismer a écrit :

One urgent question: will this feature be backported to Python 2.7? Features are never backported to the stable versions. virtualenv still exists as a standalone project which is compatible with 2.7 though.

To add to Éric's answer: the key difference between virtualenv and pyvenv, allowing pyvenv environments to be much simpler, relies on a change to the interpreter itself. This won't be backported to 2.7, and can't be released as a standalone package.

It would be possible to backport the Python API and command-line UI of pyvenv (which are different from virtualenv) as a PyPI package compatible with Python 2.7. Because it wouldn't have the interpreter change, it would have to still create environments that look like virtualenv environments (i.e. they'd have to have chunks of the stdlib symlinked in and a custom site.py). I suppose this could be useful if wanting to script creation of venvs across Python 2 and Python 3, but the utility seems limited enough that I have no plans to do this.

Carl

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