On 1 February 2014 19:29, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sa...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > On Sat, 1/2/14, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> FWIW, installing into a venv from outside it works fine > > That's what I'm saying :-) > >> However, it's substantially *harder* to explain to people how >> to use it correctly that way. > > But distil installs into venvs (both PEP 405 and virtualenv) > without needing to be in there. It's as simple as > > distil -e path/to/venv install XYZ > > So I'm not sure what you mean by "use correctly" or what > exactly is hard to explain. Distil doesn't do anything special - > after all, installing a distribution just means moving > certain files into certain locations. If you know that you're > installing into one of (a) a specific venv, or (b) user > site-packages, or (c) system site-packages, then you know > what the installation locations are without doing anything > especially clever, don't you?
I'm talking about easing the cognitive burden on developers. The pip/virtualenv model is that once an environment is activated, developers don't need to think about it anymore - they're in that environment until they explicitly switch it off. By installing pip *into* the environment, then it is automatically affected by the same settings as all other Python components, so "pip install library" inside an activated virtual environment *just does the right thing*, and it does it in a way that doesn't require any additional custom machinery or testing. Getting a substantial usability improvement *almost for free* (since requirements.txt makes it easy to discard and rebuild virtual environments as needed, reducing the maintainability burden) is a big win. Making any installer automatically respect an activated virtual environment without installing it into that environment is no doubt *feasible*, but just installing the installer *into* the environment has the same effect with requiring any additional engineering or testing effort. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
