Python Enhancement Proposals

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2023-01-25 18:30:05

This PEP recommends that package installers like pip require a virtual environment by default on Python 3.13+.

Python virtual environments are an essential part of the development workflow for Python. However, they require extra effort since they are an opt-in feature, and requires users to either:

For new users, things will seemingly work correctly when virtual environments are not used -— until they don’t. Further, activating a virtual environment uses slightly different syntax and mechanisms on different platforms. This complicates the introduction to virtual environments, since now information and context about how/why they are useful needs to explained to justify adding additional steps to the workflow.

It also creates a scope for mistakes, since users need to remember to activate the virtual environment before running an installer like pip or configure those installers to error out. On certain Linux distributions, forgetting to do so can result in the installer modifying files that are owned by the operating system (which is partially mitigated by PEP 668 for distributions that opt-in to marking their environments accordingly).

Changing the default behaviour of installers like pip to require a virtual environment to be active would: