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

Jesse Noller jnoller at gmail.com
Thu Oct 8 18:04:38 CEST 2009

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:

Simon Cross wrote:

 On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 10:31 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:

= Virtualenv and the multiple version support in Distribute = ... My opinion is that this tool exists only because Python doesn't support the installation of multiple versions for the same distributions. 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 and to allow me to hop between sets of installed Python packages while developing on multiple Python projects. I also use it as a sandbox for build bots so that multiple bots on the same machine can each build their own projects with just the known dependencies installed. This is exactly why I use virtualenv as well. I don't recall ever having wanted / needed to install multiple versions of the same library - whilst I can appreciate that it can be a real issue it has never been a problem for me. Michael

+1 - virtualenv, AFAIK is used for sandboxing/isolation of various environments, not dealing with multiple versions within the same environment. Of course, it does solve the "being dependent on a specific version" of a dependency because it is sandboxed from everything else.

Adding multiple version support doesn't remove the need for sandboxing.

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