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Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

That's good news. Last I looked at virtualenv, though, it could have used more oomph. At the time (last Fall), I was jumping back and forth between Python virtualenv environments and Ruby rvms. RVM was a bit more of a pleasure to use. I hope the virtualenv developers have closed the usability/feature gap since then.

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Can you be more specific about what you mean by "oomph"? I ask because I'm not familiar with rvms but am familiar with (and love using) virtualenv.

Virtualenv is a nice tool for managing library sets.

RVM allows you to do that plus it allows you to install and manage multiple versions of Ruby itself. Want to have side-by-side Ruby environments of 1.8.6 and 1.9.3? No problem.

https://rvm.io//

Interesting, I've had an almost opposite experience, but I don't know the ruby landscape all that well (bundler/gemsets/rbenv/rvm etc) and I suppose it just depends on what background you're coming from.

FWIW, when creating a virtualenv the -p flag lets you choose a python binary (and therefore version).

virtualenv allows you to do that too (virtualenv -p [path to python]). You just need to download the interpreter yourself.

rvm will download the requested version's source, apply any patches or flags you specify and then compile it. You don't have to do any work other than installing rvm. The rubies are also stored in ~/.rvm so your system doesn't get cluttered up.

Rvm also integrates into your shell so that when you cd into a project directory with a .rvmrc file, it will source the file and load the proper ruby and gemset for that project.

Virtualenv is much closer to ruby's bundler gem than rvm.

It's much closer to rbenv rather than Bundler. zc.buildout is what is close to bundler.

Check out pythonbrew (https://github.com/utahta/pythonbrew).

In my experience, pythonbrew is to virtualenv as rvm is to rbenv.

Second on that. I find that pythonbrew fits the way I actually work with multiple installs much better than virtualenv (even with virtualenvwrapper) does.

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