Re: PYTHONPATH woes

[Pjotr Prins]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 11:53:54AM +0100, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> Would it be good to make the wrappers for Python scripts stricter and
> not accept any user-set PYTHONPATH?

I think that is a bad idea. You need to be able to opt out. Also
people need to experiment with modules without understanding Guix per
se. In my upcomping blog I would emphasize packaging at the point you
become a serious user.

That should come with a health warning ;). Similarly we should allow
for LD_LIBRARY_PATH etc. It is what they exist for, even if it is
dangerous.

> How do we approach the problem of having both Python 2 modules and
> Python 3 modules in the same profile?  PYTHONPATH will be set to refer
> to the site-packages directories of both versions, which is never good.
> Does Python offer us a way to do better?  Can we make use of pth files
> to get around this problem somehow?

Python should have created PYTHONPATH2 to split them out. We could
patch python2 to do just that.

Even so, the real solution is separate profiles. I get that with
versions of Ruby too.

Pj.