[Distutils] restart-in-venv (was: PEX at Twitter (re: PEX - Twitter's multi-platform executable archive format for Python))

[Nick Coghlan]

On 4 February 2014 19:23, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> It's not especially elegant to have to restart in a venv, but IMO it's the
> lesser of two "evils". It is something that we currently have to do
> (virtualenv does it too, with -p) but if a more elegant approach were
> found, I'd certainly use it. The other inelegance (install pip in every venv)
> is not essential, as I've shown.

I've pointed out the technical problem with trying to rely solely on a
global install on Linux: it makes it hard to use a newer version of
pip than the OS provides. Installing pip into the virtual environments
avoids that problem without conflicting with the OS package manager
when it comes to the system Python installation.

That decoupling from the distro version is a worthwhile technical
benefit of the current approach. While it does mean that multiple
virtual environments may need to be updated when a new version of pip
is released, it *also* makes testing with different versions
straightforward.

Cheers,
Nick.

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