[Python-Dev] PEP 370 - per-user scripts directory on Windows (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Fri Feb 13 10:57:53 CET 2015

On 13 February 2015 at 09:47, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

I just thought of something ... as far as I know, we've enabled searching for a command on the path - since when a venv is active in the sense of VIRTUALENV being defined, PATH is also set up so that the venv's Scripts folder is on it - so we would just need to find "python.exe" on the PATH and invoke that - no need to even use the value of VIRTUALENV, making implementation simpler. What do you think?

Two comments:

  1. I'm not sure (but I've not dug into the implementation yet) that there's much practical difference between locating python.exe via a PATH search, or locating it via concatenating VIRTUAL_ENV and the relative path.
  2. It would be a nice, although extremely obscure, feature to be able to allow people who want to keep Python off their path to set VIRTUAL_ENV but not set PATH, so that py.exe does the right thing but there's still no python.exe on PATH. Limit the dependency on a single environment variable rather than two, in other words.

Paul

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