Re: Managing environments (Python venv, guix environment, etc.)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: sbaugh@catern.com
> Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 20:02:15 -0400
> 
> I do think it's best to use the same mechanism (process-file) that is
> used to support remote access.
> 
> Really, remote access is very similar to entering a different local
> environment. They're different contexts in which to execute
> commands.
> 
> And consider: Much of the work in determining what is sensible to
> execute in the default context, and what is sensible to execute in the
> remote/custom context, has already been done for remote access. ispell
> runs the spell-checker in the default context; M-x compile runs the
> compile in the custom context; and so on. I think this solves the issues
> Eli brought up in another mail.

It may seem to you that remote access is similar to a different
environment, but in fact they are very different.  Environment is not
a property of a file name, it is a property of a project.  Moreover,
past attempts I know about to use file handlers for processing local
files turned out to have subtle misfeatures.  Even more importantly,
the _conceptual_ difference is huge, and it's bound to bite us in the
long run, because people who work on the file-name handlers has the
remote-access concept on their mind, and will write code that caters
to those use cases, so we will sooner or later end up with code that
subtly breaks in the environment use cases.

So I'm very much opposed to using file-name handlers for supporting
environments.