ncoghlan
commented
9 years ago As far as "why vex, and not the other helpers?", it's mainly because it's much simpler. It's strictly less powerful than virtualenvwrapper, but still covers all the basics of setting up, activating and deleting environments.
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pew is another shell independent alternative to virtualenvwrapper, although it aims to match the full virtualenvwrapper feature set much more closely.
Both vex and pew are also pure Python, unlike other POSIX only approaches like pyenv (which I don't consider particularly interesting, as they don't work in native Windows shells)
dstufft
pfmoore
sashahart
r1chardj0n3s
Ivoz
berdario
theacodes
(Note: the issue scope broadened considerably over the course of the subsequent discussion. When reading the comments below, note that the early ones were responding to the original issue title and description, which are preserved below)
As you accumulate more virtual environments, it's useful to have a tool to help manage them (creating new ones, listing the ones that already exist, activating them, deactivating them, etc). virtualenvwrapper, pyenv, vex, pew - these kinds of things.
However, as with packaging tools themselves, new users are unlikely to have the knowledge they need to evaluate the trade-offs between the different tools that are available. In particular, the differences between creating a subshell (vex, pew), modifying the current shell session (virtualenvwrapper), and permanently modifying user configuration settings (pyenv) have different trade-offs in terms of the amount of assumed knowledge regarding the operation of the system shell, as well as the chances of inadvertently impacting the operation of other Python applications on the system.
Considering just those four tools, and their complexity and potential for side effects, I'd assess them as follows:
In that context, I'd suggest that vex would be an appropriate recommendation as a minimal "getting started with environment management" solution. If a given user eventually decides they want something more configurable, or more closely integrated with their preferred shell environment, then they may want to explore pew, virtualenvwrapper or pyenv, and the packaging guide could point them in those directions (with some discussion of the associated trade-offs).
Outside the Python package management space, conda then takes the step up to being a full cross-platform platform, managing the Python runtime and arbitrary external dependencies, rather than just Python virtual environments. However, as an all-in-one solution that bundles environment management, dependency management and binary distribution, conda's operating in a different category from the more single-purpose tools being discussed here.
Original issue title: Mention "vex" somewhere (at least in the "Other projects" section)
Original issue description:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/vex is a nice alternative to things like virtualenvwrapper that I discovered via the PyCon New Zealand lightning talks.
It works by creating new subshells, rather than trying to alter the existing one. So deactivation is just a matter of exiting from the subshell.
This is really nice, because it's shell independent, and provides all the niceties of an integrated command line application, rather than a collection of shell functions.