Allow to use non-bundled versions of other projects

[Arfrever]

It would be nice if virtualenv could use non-bundled versions of other projects (i.e. PIP and Setuptools) and, when they are not found, fall back to wheels in virtualenv_support directory.

Some tests of another project use virtualenv, and fail in some configuration without a custom fix in urllib3, which is bundled by requests, which is bundled by PIP, which is bundled by virtualenv :( .

[Ivoz]

i.e downloading setuptools and pip by default? I disagree with this, as that would make setting up virtualenvs take way too long. I myself often make temporary ones to test things and having it download 3mb of packages by default every time would be insufferable to me.

Some tests of another project use virtualenv, and fail in some configuration without a custom fix in urllib3, which is bundled by requests, which is bundled by PIP, which is bundled by virtualenv :( .

Those packages (requests, urllib3) are not in the system path, though. They are vendored by pip / requests. If there's a problem, it would probably be most direct to raise an issue for those projects respectively.

[Arfrever]

I meant something like:

try:
    import pip
except ImportError:
    use virtualenv_support/pip-*.whl

(I filed pypa/pip#1651 for PIP.)

[Ivoz]

and fail in some configuration without a custom fix in urllib3,

What is this custom fix?

Also note you can replace the pip virtualenv uses by using --extra-search-dir pointing to a folder with a custom pip wheel, so this is already possible.

[Arfrever]

I currently have:

/usr/lib64/pythonX.Y/site-packages/pkg_resources.py
/usr/lib64/pythonX.Y/site-packages/setuptools
/usr/lib64/pythonX.Y/site-packages/urllib3         # modified
/usr/lib64/pythonX.Y/site-packages/requests        # modified to use above urllib3
/usr/lib64/pythonX.Y/site-packages/pip             # scheduled for being modified to use above requests
/usr/lib64/pythonX.Y/site-packages/virtualenv.py
/usr/lib64/pythonX.Y/site-packages/virtualenv_support
/usr/lib64/pythonX.Y/site-packages/virtualenv_support/__init__.py
/usr/lib64/pythonX.Y/site-packages/virtualenv_support/pip-*.whl
/usr/lib64/pythonX.Y/site-packages/virtualenv_support/setuptools-*.whl

I would like that setup.py of virtualenv support an environmental variable, which, when set, would make installed version of virtualenv use previously installed versions of pip and setuptools (which are in normal directories, not wheels) (and disable installation of then unused /usr/lib64/pythonX.Y/site-packages/virtualenv_support/*.whl).

[stale]

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