On 14.06.2011, at 01:46, Carl Meyer wrote: > On 06/13/2011 08:07 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote: >> On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 10:50 PM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sa...@yahoo.co.uk> >> wrote: >>> You're right in terms of the current Python ecosystem and 3.x adoption, >>> because >>> of course this approach requires support from Python itself in terms of its >>> site.py code. However, virtual environments have a utility beyond supporting >>> older Pythons on newer OSes, since another common use case is having >>> different >>> library environments sandboxed from each other on different projects, even >>> if >>> all those projects are using Python 3.3+. >> >> Yeah, even if the innate one struggles on later OS releases that >> changed things in a backwards incompatible way, it will still be >> valuable on the OS versions that are around at the time that version >> of Python gets released. > > FWIW, historically pretty much every new Python version has broken > virtualenv, and new OS versions almost never have. Virtualenv isn't > especially OS-dependent (not nearly as much as some other stdlib > modules): the most OS-dependent piece is "shell activation", and that's > a feature I would prefer to entirely leave out of the stdlib virtualenv > (it's a convenience, not a necessity for virtualenv use, and the need to > maintain it for a variety of OS shells is a maintenance burden I don't > think Python should adopt). > > In fact, the only new-OS-version adjustment I can recall virtualenv > needing to make is when Debian introduced dist-packages -- but even that > doesn't really apply, as that was distro-packager change to Python > itself. With a built-in virtualenv it would be the distro packagers > responsibility to make sure their patch to Python doesn't break the > virtualenv module.
FTR, there is some special casing for Mac OS framework installs included, too. Not sure if that should be considered a stability threatening issue though since Apple hasn't changed much on that layout, AFAIK. > So I don't think a virtualenv stdlib module would be at all likely to > break on a new OS release, if Python itself is not broken by that OS > release. (It certainly wouldn't be the stdlib module most likely to be > broken by OS changes, in comparison to e.g. shutil, threading...) Jannis _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com