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

[sbaugh@catern.com]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: sbaugh@catern.com
>> Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2016 04:25:03 -0400
>> 
>> Ideally, Elisp code would also (somehow) go through the environment
>> dispatcher, and see the exec-path and process-environment of the
>> appropriate environment.
>
> I don't see why this would be needed.  Emacs can load Lisp packages
> and run programs even if they are not on load-path/exec-path.  Why do
> we need to tweak these lists which are so central to Emacs core?

Maybe I was unclear. I don't think load-path should be tweaked by
environment.el (even though, since it can be initialized by
EMACSLOADPATH, and that can change in different environments, you could
conceivably argue that it should be) since it is so central to
Emacs.

But there are many Elisp functions that use exec-path. For example,
browse-url uses executable-find (which uses exec-path) to determine
which browsers are available. If exec-path (or maybe just all its users
in core) is not tweaked by environment.el, but the process functions
are, these functions like browse-url will behave in a broken way.