Hello all, Here at PyCon we've had some discussion about building a virtualenv-alike into Python core for Python 3.3. The goal is to improve on virtualenv by providing something that does what virtualenv does without requiring a copied Python binary, symlinked/copied parts of the standard library, or a forked site.py.
(I'm not entirely sure that distutils-sig is the right venue for discussing this, but it's the closest I know of and was recommended by others in our conversations here; if there's a better place please let me know; maybe python-ideas? The patch as is stands does affect sysconfig.py, which is used more by distutils than anything else.) The idea we discussed is to add to Python's built-in site.py the ability to set paths up for a virtual environment, triggered by certain environment variables. Then, for convenience, there'll be a small executable which can be placed in the "bin/" directory of a virtual environment and knows how to set up these environment variables and then exec() the system Python binary. Larry Hastings had already created this wrapper executable at last year's PyCon, and tonight I made the necessary modifications to site.py and sysconfig.py to support it on the Python side. The early prototype is now working well (at least on Linux; I think it ought to work on OS X, and should work partially on Windows as well), and I'd welcome review and comment: https://bitbucket.org/carljm/cpythonv Look in Tools/pythonv/README.rst for instructions. This is an early prototype and will certainly require refinement (not to mention most likely a PEP, at some point). Please try it out and let me know if it works for you! Thanks, Carl _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig