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"It's completely global"

It doesn't have to be. You can have a launcher for a project that sets PYTHONPATH just when you launch that project.

What is bad practice is to be setting PYTHONPATH in your .bashrc, and for the reason you give - that makes it global across python launches.

That'll prevent it leaking to most things, but not to subprocesses of your application.

For example your application might interact with command-line tools written in Python, and unless you delete PYTHONPATH from the environment variables prior to launching any subprocesses, they'll inherit it. This could lead to subtle and confusing breakage.

So is PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH. You just change those as you need to...

Alright. I actually set it in a Docker container. It works well there.