Make --relocatable even more relocatable

[omribahumi]

Apparently even when running virtualenv --relocatable on my virtualenv, it's still not entirely relocatable:

1. Links in ${VIRTUAL_ENV}/local are absolute instead of symbolic
2. VIRTUAL_ENV environment variable defined in bin/activate is hard-coded

I'm thinking of fixing these myself, here's how I thought of doing it:

1. Walk the virtualenv directory tree, make all absolute links to destinations inside the virtualenv relative (absolute links to paths outside of the virtualenv root will stay absolute)
2. Replace hard-coded virtualenv path with bash magic (similar to this):

VIRTUAL_ENV="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )/.." && pwd )"

Any thoughts?

Omri.

[nukemberg]

+1

[elistevens]

@omribahumi have you started on this?

Is there a reason those links aren't relative to start with? It's not clear if there's a firm reason why virtualenvs don't start off relocatable.

[omribahumi]

@wickedgrey I wrote an external script to update the relevant files. I didn't want to maintain a fork of virtualenv.

I see no reason not to make the links symbolic globally, as you said.
One more thing we should consider is /bin/sh compatibility. My 2nd suggestion involves a BASH trick that doesn't work with /bin/sh.

We can add a new activate script though: activate.bash

[franciscolourenco]

+1

[kairichard]

+1

[dbarbeau]

Yes, the bash activate script should set VIRTUAL_ENV with bash magic. This would help a ton when packaging our projects for use with external tools like uwsgi. So a huge +1.

However, as stated earlier, this doesn't concern --relocatable, but activate which should be modified with that black magic.

Are there strong motivations against this change?

[arizvisa]

Adding a reference to the newest issue #1067 related to this to help consolidate efforts on solving this half-decade old problem with the activation scripts.

[stale]

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