[Python-ideas] pythonv / Python path (original) (raw)

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Sun Oct 24 00:11:44 CEST 2010

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?

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.

-Brett

For Windows it would have to be different (maybe similar to Setuptools' cmd.exe), but... I think it's possible, and I'd just hope some Windows people would explore what specifically is needed.

virtualenv has another feature, which isn't part of pythonv and needn't be part of Python, which is to bootstrap installation tools. -- Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org

More information about the Python-ideas mailing list