[Python-Dev] draft PEP: virtual environments (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sat Oct 29 17:23:42 CEST 2011

On Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:37:35 -0600 Carl Meyer <carl at oddbird.net> wrote:

What about include files? - -------------------------

For example, ZeroMQ installs zmq.h and zmqutils.h in $VE/include, whereas SIP (part of PyQt4) installs sip.h by default in $VE/include/pythonX.Y. With virtualenv, everything works because the PythonX.Y include is symlinked, so everything that's needed is in $VE/include. At the moment the reference implementation doesn't do anything with include files, besides creating the include directory; this might need to change, to copy/symlink $VE/include/pythonX.Y. As in Python there's no abstraction for a site-specific include directory, other than for platform-specific stuff, then the user expectation would seem to be that all include files anyone could ever want should be found in one of just two locations, with sysconfig labels "include" & "platinclude". There's another issue: what if includes are Python-version-specific? For example, SIP installs by default into $VE/include/pythonX.Y rather than $VE/include, presumably because there's version-specific stuff in there - but even if that's not the case with SIP, it could be the case with some other package.

Why would that be a problem? Do you plan to install several versions of Python in a single VE?

Activation and Utility Scripts - ------------------------------

Virtualenv provides shell "activation" scripts as a user convenience, to put the virtual environment's Python binary first on the shell PATH. This is a maintenance burden, as separate activation scripts need to be provided and maintained for every supported shell.

We already have Unix shell scripts and BAT files in the source tree. Is it really complicated to maintain these additional shell scripts? Is there a lot of code in them?

Regards

Antoine.

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