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

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 07/24/2016 11:25 AM, sbaugh@catern.com wrote:

> Just a note: Ideally, Elisp code would also (somehow) go through the
> environment dispatcher, and see the exec-path and process-environment of
> the appropriate environment. There is surely Elisp code makes direct use
> of exec-path/process-environment and it should behave the same as
> external processes.

Like Eli said, this seems unwise. But it hints at a logical problem: if 
start-process and friends are simply documented to use exec-path and 
process-environment, but use their modified values in some 
circumstances, someone trying to debug this could have a big problem.

Especially if the feature is implemented not using nadvice, but with 
file handlers.

So I think we should either fall back to the idea of using buffer-local 
values and make it work somehow, or have environment.el provide its own 
versions of call-process, etc, that use the modified environments.

The latter option will require modifying all appropriate callers, but 
seems like the cleanest approach to me.

Alternatively, the docstrings of all process-interacting functions 
should be updated to mention environments.el, and at that point it would 
make sense to just integrate it into the core. Maybe the result would 
look similar to what you said, with all process primitives using the new 
functions (called e.g. environment-exec-path and 
environment-process-environment).