Fwd: [Fab-user] Virtualenv Use Case

[Jeff Forcier]

(

(S and I had a short off-list dialogue, I think by accident; he just
forwarded his side to the list, so here's my reply below :))

On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 12:06 PM, s s <address@hidden> wrote:

> Uh, the first thing switching to a virtual environment does is mutilate the
> environment so that the virtenv becomes the "context" for subsequent
> commands or do you mean something else?

Man I'm on a roll lately, first forgetting about www-data and now this.

Stuff like virtualenvs/workon are the sorts of things one would put in
this "environment setup" section, because their *sole purpose* is to
modify the shell env.

What I was referring to are commands that do something nontrivial, but
which modify the shell environment *as a side effect*. I can't think
offhand of anything that does such a thing (e.g.a shell script or
something which creates some files AND also export some env vars) and
I'd imagine that doing so is generally bad practice.

But, if such a thing existed and was needed in a fab task, a user
probably would not want to run it multiple times in a row, and so
putting it into the "setup" for a block of commands could be dangerous
or at least add a lot of runtime, because it would run prior to each
"actual" command.

Does that make sense?

-Jeff