Getting rid of virtual environments with a better dependency system

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2020 at 4:35 AM Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 3:00 AM 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 before.
> >
> > In a professional environment, we've came to a point in which most people
> > use virtual environments or code environments to avoid "polluting a global
> > environment".
> >
> I think it'd be a good idea to have a directory (hierarchy) for each python
> application, and make pip (or similar tool) download to that directory -
> and then modify the _application's_ sys.path to include that directory at
> the beginning.
>
> This is what I've done with backshift (
> https://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/backshift/).  It works well,
> without a need for a virtual environment, while still giving dependency
> isolation.  But it's not as automatic as I'd like - I've had to manually
> specify what dependencies to put in the directory.
>

Can you elaborate on exactly how this is different? When you create a
venv, it creates some symlinks and such that basically mean you get
that - a directory for the application, pip installs into it, and then
when you run that Python binary, it'll automatically have sys.path
contain the appropriate directory.

ChrisA