Add the ability to disable the new DeprecatePythonPath feature

[jan11011977]

Could we please add an option to go back to the old "pythonPath" behaviour.

Selecting the python interpreter using the "python.pythonPath" setting has been working great for us. We check our Python environments into source control, along with the vscode settings and our code. Our engineers don't have to worry about anything; they just open the vscode workspace and everything works.

With this new "defaultPythonPath" system, a lot of our engineers are ending up with the wrong interpreter (it doesn't help that when this feature was rolled out, VSCode would prompt people to change the interpreter and then highlight a "recommended" interpreter which was the wrong one).
Once they have selected the wrong interpreter, they are then stuck with a broken VSCode. For most of our engineers, Python isn't their primary language, so they have no idea what's wrong. They will just suffer with broken Intellisense and spurious linting errors, and assume it's meant to be like that.

If I'm being honest, this new feature is a nightmare for us. We are desperate to go back to the old system where everything is centrally controlled and just works.

[luabud]

Hi @jan11011977, thanks for providing feedback. The new setting should have the same behavior as python.pythonPath did in terms of selecting the right interpreter when the workspace loads.

For context, the Python extension will only prompt to select an interpreter if it doesn't recognize the one defined by python.defaultInterpreterPath (and the same happens for python.pythonPath). So when you say the following, it sounds to me that what you're experiencing is actually a bug:

With this new "defaultPythonPath" system, a lot of our engineers are ending up with the wrong interpreter (it doesn't help that when this feature was rolled out, VSCode would prompt people to change the interpreter and then highlight a "recommended" interpreter which was the wrong one).

Are you able to share some steps so we can reproduce the issue?

[jan11011977]

Hi @luabud, sorry for the late reply.

My understanding is that python.defaultInterpreterPath is ignored if the user has already selected a valid Python interpreter. The trouble comes if the user has selected the wrong Python interpreter. We check a full Python install into source control, and we'd like VSCode to use that. however if a user selected a different (valid) interpreter for example one off their own machine, there is no way for us to correct that problem automatically.

Please correct me if I have misunderstood how this works.

[luabud]

Apologies for the delay in my response!

Your understanding is correct. Our recommendation in this case is to not have the Python path checked into source control (i.e. remove the python.defaultInterpreterPath entry from .vscode/settings.json) for this not to happen, as rarely ever the path to the interpreter will be the same across different machines.

However I will keep this issue open so I can talk to the team about it and make a decision.