[Distutils] Need help with a usecase

Jim Fulton jim at zope.com
Tue Apr 19 18:05:52 CEST 2011


On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Carl Meyer <carl at oddbird.net> wrote:
> Hi Reinout,
>
> On 04/19/2011 02:46 AM, Reinout van Rees wrote:
>> The one thing that, to me, still is a big advantage of buildout over
>> virtualenv in cases like this: you can just run the scripts in bin/*
>> as-is. You do not need to activate the virtualenv beforehand.
>
> There are good reasons why one might prefer buildout over virtualenv,
> but this is not one of them ;-) A virtualenv also has a bin/ directory
> with scripts in it (including the interpreter, bin/python). You can run
> any of those scripts directly (with no activation) and they will run
> within the virtualenv.
>
> Activation is a shell convenience that is entirely unnecessary to the
> operation of virtualenv. All it does is put the virtualenv's bin/
> directory first on your $PATH, so its scripts will take priority over
> globally-installed scripts.

That's cool. I wish I'd known that. :)

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfulton


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