Don't use that one
— Then don’t raise your arm.
Like I said in the original comment you replied to and are now ignoring:
> That’s not a practical solution. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, as demonstrated above. By that logic one could say “don’t change anything about your system and you don’t even need virtual environments”. Which is somewhat true, but also profoundly unhelpful.
- Doctor, it hurts when I hit my head on the wall
- Then don't hit your head on the wall
You have solutions available, use them
— Hey, so you know how we have this requirement, which came about after years of dealing with and understanding a problem and the available solutions?
— Yes, what about it?
— Well, a random commenter on Hacker News who has zero context of the problem has suggested we use a method we already found inadequate for our specific use case.
— Oh wow, in that case let’s replace the whole system right now.
I'm not ignoring you; I just don't think your use case of "I want to capture the Python from Xcode in my dev env so it's resilient to changes and upgrades" is something anyone wants (or should want) to do. Do you really want to ship on that version? Are you asking your users to install Xcode?
> That’s not a practical solution. Sometimes you don’t have a choice, as demonstrated above. By that logic one could say “don’t change anything about your system and you don’t even need virtual environments”. Which is somewhat true, but also profoundly unhelpful.
In other words: when are you forced to use Xcode's Python for development, and why would that be a good idea? I'm earnestly asking; there may be reasons; I'm just not aware of any.
Then you are wrong. Simple as that. I’m describing a very real scenario.
> Do you really want to ship on that version?
Holy moly, is it really that hard to understand the difference between wanting and having to? For the use case, and older version in a consistent place which is easy to install is the best solution.
> Are you asking your users to install Xcode?
Triggering an Xcode CLI tools installation is simple and done graphically. And it’s one step removed from installing Homebrew or pyenv, which both need them (even for the scripted installation, pyenv requires git).
> In other words: when are you forced to use Xcode's Python for development, and why would that be a good idea?
See, for a moment there you understood it’s about users, not just your own dev environment, but then went back. Unfortunately, after this conversation with you two I no longer have the energy to go through it in detail in an uphill explanation. Another time, maybe.
> Then you are wrong. Simple as that. I’m describing a very real scenario.
>> Do you really want to ship on that version?
> Holy moly, is it really that hard to understand the difference between wanting and having to? For the use case, and older version in a consistent place which is easy to install is the best solution.
Tone is hard on the internet, but I'm honestly trying to understand your use case. The way I understand it now is "I want to be able to develop Python programs locally using only Xcode's Python." I'm still not sure why you want to (generally when people ship Python programs they bundle a runtime) but let's set that to the side. For this use case, I don't understand why symlinks don't work for you. Xcode installs to versioned folders so you can have multiple Xcode installs side by side, that way new versions won't overwrite things. I'm obviously not an expert here though; am I missing something?
I never said that. My assertion was that venv does not ensure the same Python runtime.¹ That’s it. I don’t have a problem with that. But I do know of one situation where it could make a difference and “do it another way” is not a reasonable answer.
If we ever meet in person I’ll gladly explain it in detail.