Fair response it's just nothing else feels like this weird duct tape'd together bunch of hacks to work around the design mistakes of the base language assuming it's a top level part of the OS.
> which is otherwise impossible on Linux
Node, Rust, etc all manage it.
> Because the entire point is that...
I just mean there is a history of Python using overly generic naming: activate, easy-install. Just feels weird and dirty to me that you'd call such a specific things names like these and I think it's indicative of this ideology that Python is deep in the OS.
Maybe if I'd aliased the activate command a decade ago I wouldn't feel this way or think about it.
> Node, Rust, etc all manage it.
How do they work around this?You're arguing an awful lot in favor of Python venvs for someone who doesn't really seem to know any other programming language ecosystems in depth.
Similar mindset to the original creators of venv, I imagine :-)
Or you don't realize the difference between something like "cargo run" and "python file.py".
They don’t use environment variables. See also git.
... And as I explained repeatedly in multiple other posts throughout the thread, you can also use virtual environments without activating them, in which case you are similarly not using environment variables.
The git model is based on automatic detection of the .git folder, by having it in a location determined by convention. Many higher-level tools in the Python ecosystem have provided analogous handling of virtual environments over the years. Uv is doing it now; historically pyenv was used for that sort of thing, for example.
But when I said "which is otherwise impossible on Linux", I was specifically referring to the setting of environment variables, because OP asked why an activation script had to be sourced, and the reason is because that's what "activation" is.
This is a model that enough people liked using many years ago, to become dominant. It creates the abstraction of being "in" the virtual environment, while giving you the flexibility to put the actual file tree whereever you want.