[Python-Dev] PEP 405 (Python Virtual Environments) and Windows script support (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue May 29 03:00:46 CEST 2012

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Carl Meyer <carl at oddbird.net> wrote:

On 05/28/2012 04:24 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

It would have been better if the issue of script management on Windows had been raised in PEP 405 itself - I likely would have declared PEP 397 a dependency before accepting it (even if that meant the feature missed the alpha 4 deadline and first appeared in beta 1, or potentially even missed 3.3 altogether).

However, I'm not going to withdraw the acceptance of the PEP over this - while I would have made a different decision at the time given the additional information (due to the general preference to treat Windows as a first class deployment target), I think reversing my decision now would make the situation worse rather than better. I think it's unfortunate that this issue (which is http://bugs.python.org/issue12394) has become entangled with PEP 405 at all, since AFAICT it is entirely orthogonal. This is a distutils2/packaging issue regarding how scripts are installed on Windows. It happens to be relevant when trying to install things into a PEP 405 venv on Windows, but it applies to a non-virtual Python installation on Windows every bit as much as it applies to a PEP 405 environment. In an earlier discussion with Vinay I thought we had agreed that it was an orthogonal issue and that this proposed patch for it would be removed from the PEP 405 reference implementation before it was merged to CPython trunk; I think that would have been preferable. This is why there is no mention of the issue in PEP 405 - it doesn't belong there, because it is not related.

Ah, thanks for the clarification.

In that case: Vinay, please revert everything from the pyvenv commit that was actually related to issue #12394 rather than being part of the PEP 405 implementation. As Carl says, it's an unrelated change that needs to be discussed separately.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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