Re:My Python Development Environment, 2018 Edition
by odonnellryan on Thursday February 22, 2018 @09:14PM
(#16443649)
Yeah I understand what you mean. I have around ~12 projects, for different clients, that are just recent enough that I might need to access the environments.
If that was one environment (forget some of them being stuck on 2.x) the number of damn dependencies would be monstrous!
When I need to bring a partner onto the project, I can't give them a requirements file that's 5x what it should be!
> I just never understood what all the fuss is about.
It's to keep environments clean + easy to maintain. Virtual is probably a bad word for it. It isn't like Docker or a VM.
I don't think too many Python projects that are not libraries support many versions, that isn't the point of virtualenv or conda anyway.
Installing on another machine is just a matter of pip install -r requirements.txt, if it's for a dev. other wise it's just a docker run ....
I do know that most Python devs use virtualenv, I just never understood what all the fuss is about. Of course I don't mind if the others in team use it, I just never saw the appeal so I'm curious what other peoples' reasons are.
Maybe I don't see the need because I came to Python quite late, a little before Docker came around, and we were early adopters for Docker. So we solved testing and production with Docker (and thus never needed to support multiple Python versions in parallel). It's really one of those small mysteries I don't understand. :)