Hacker News Reader

I don't see why people keep on with virtualenv when all you need to create a sandbox is to set the PYTHONPATH environment variable...?

View on HN

Because it's easier, and why not?

I have been slightly disappointed after setting up my project in a virtualenv and upgrading some stuff on my system when some virtualenv packages broke. I thought that is what virtualenv was supposed to prevent.

(Maybe I need to read the entire virtualenv documentation, to have a solid idea of how it works, and what it does exactly, but hen that will take time, and the PYTHONPATH option starts to look more appealing, as at least I do know how environmental variables work in Linux).

That's odd, in the many years I've been using venv for, I can't remember many breakages, and none that weren't fixed by either just running "virtualenv env" again or just removing and recreating it (a two-minute affair).

How can it be easier to install more packages then just setting an environment variable?

Because I don't have to type the path every time.

Because you can't create aliases in bash, or make your own file to source instead of ./activate?

Neither is as easy as "source activate".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com