[Python-ideas] pythonv / Python path

[Ian Bicking]

The recent path discussion reminded me of a project I talked about with
Larry Hastings at the last PyCon about virtualenv and what could possibly be
included into Python.  Larry worked on a prototype that I was supposed to do
something with, and then I didn't, which is lame of me but deserves some
note:

http://bitbucket.org/larry/pythonv/src

It satisfies several requirements that I feel virtualenv accomplishes and a
lot of other systems do not; but it also has a few useful features
virtualenv doesn't have and is much simpler (mostly because it has a
compiled component, and changes the system site.py).

The features I think are important:

* Works with "environments", which is a set of paths and installed
components that work together (instead of just ad hoc single path extensions
like adding one entry to PYTHONPATH)
* Modifies sys.prefix, so all the existing installation tools respect the
new environment
* Works with #!, which basically means it needs its own per-environment
interpreter, as #! is so completely broken that it can't have any real
arguments (though it occurs to me that a magic comment could work)
* Doesn't use environmental variables (actually it uses them internally, but
not in a way that is exposed to developers) -- for instance, hg should not
be affected by whatever development you are doing just because it happens to
be written in Python

Anyway, I think what Larry did with pythonv accomplishes a lot of these
things, and probably some more constraints that I've forgotten about.  It
does have a more complicated/dangerous installation procedure than
virtualenv (but if it was part of Python proper that would be okay).

-- 
Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org
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