Virtualenv useful on Mac, not so much on PC

Well, after wrestling with virtualenv on both the PC and Mac, I think I’m going to stick with it for my Mac but bail on it for PC python work.

I really like it on the Mac because now that I’ve moved on to Snow Leopard and Python 2.6, I’m not using a nice isolated environment like the one EPD provided me with. Even though I’m using MacPorts Python 2.6.x, packages get installed into the same location as Snow Leopard’s Python 2.6.1. Since python packages don’t come with an uninstall option, and because I haven’t a clue how to restore Snow Leopard’s Python if I end up adding too much 3rd party gorp, virtualenv seems the prudent course for development on OSX. The only 3rd party libraries I have installed in the main python site-packages folder are setuptools, virtualenv, pip, ipython, and yolk. Everything else (so far) is getting put into a virtual environment. Also, now that I’ve figured out how to get virtualenv and ipython to play nice, isolated development is running smooth as silk.

On Windows, I’ve run into issues related to path names with spaces, and other minor problems. Since I control where python gets installed on Windows, and since python is fairly self contained, its easy to just blow out my install and start over if I add so much cruft that python blows up on me. There’s not much incentive at this time to get virtualenv configuration debugged on my PC.

Leave a Reply