Getting rid of virtual environments with a better dependency system

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 10:06 PM j c <jucaranlu at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> I don't know if this suggestion is missing some point, or it's part of something already proposed.
>
> In a professional environment, we've came to a point in which most people use virtual environments or conda environments to avoid "polluting a global environment".
>
> However, I think that's a problem with the default behaviour of the module management in Python. A nice default behaviour would be to search for a requirements.txt file in the same directory as __file__, and use the newest version of every module that matches the constraints. If no requirements where given, the newest version already installed could be used. That would require allowing multiple versions of the same module to be downloaded.
>

This would stop venvs from providing the isolation that they are
supposed to, and instead would just create yet another way to invoke
dependency hell. No thank you.

A virtual environment isn't just a way to install different versions
of modules. It's way WAY more than that, and if you need to have too
many different versions around, you have bigger problems to deal with.

(As a simple thought experiment to prove the problem with your
proposal: what happens with your dependencies' dependencies, and what
if they conflict? At what point would that be detected?)

ChrisA