[Python-Dev] Python install layout and the PATH on win32 (Rationale part 1: Regularizing the layout) (original) (raw)

PJ Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Sat Mar 24 04:22:04 CET 2012

On Mar 23, 2012 3:53 PM, "Carl Meyer" <carl at oddbird.net> wrote:

Hi PJ, On 03/23/2012 12:35 PM, PJ Eby wrote: > AFAICT, virtualenvs are overkill for most development anyway. If you're > not using distutils except to install dependencies, then configure > distutils to install scripts and libraries to the same directory, and > then do all your development in that directory. Presto! You now have a > cross-platform "virtualenv". Want the scripts on your path? Add that > directory to your path... or if on Windows, don't bother, since the > current directory is usually on the path. (In fact, if you're only > using easyinstall to install your dependencies, you don't even need to > edit the distutils configuration, just use "-md targetdir".) Creating and using a virtualenv is, in practice, easier than any of those alternatives,

Really? As I said, I've never seen the need to try, since just installing stuff to a directory on PYTHONPATH seems quite easy enough for me.

that the "isolation from system site-packages" feature is quite popular (the outpouring of gratitude when virtualenv went isolated-by-default a few months ago was astonishing), and AFAIK none of your alternative proposals support that at all.

What is this isolation for, exactly? If you don't want site-packages on your path, why not use python -S?

(Sure, nobody knows about these things, but surely that's a documentation problem, not a tooling problem.)

Don't get me wrong, I don't have any deep objection to virtualenvs, I've just never seen the point (outside of the scenarios I mentioned), and thus don't see what great advantage will be had by rearranging layouts to make them shareable across platforms, when "throw stuff in a directory" seems perfectly serviceable for that use case already. Tools that don't support "just throw it in a directory" as a deployment option are IMO unpythonic -- practicality beats purity, after all. ;-) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20120323/dfcc8eb3/attachment.html>

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