On 4/15/25 10:43, Friedrich Romstedt via Python-list wrote:
Many people put emphasis on that you need to *activate* a virtualenv before
using it, but no-one so far stressed the fact that you got Sphinx installed
to ~/jonathan/.local/lib/python3.13/site-packages *without using *--user.
To be clear: you do not have to activate a virtualenv to use *Python*
from it. If you just call the python by the path it's in, it figures
everything out (and sets some variables you can query vi sysconfig if
you have reason to actually need those details (look for installation
schemes).
What activating gives you is some path fiddling, and some prompt
fiddling (although the prompt fiddling keeps saying it's deprecated).
The latter is a visual clue; the former means you can also find *other*
commands installed in the virtualenv - including pip.
/path/to/virtualenv//bin/python -m pip install ... will work whether
you activated or not.
pip install ... finds the first command in your PATH named pip, which
may or may not be the one in the virtualenv, *unless* you've activated
it, because that's the only way the virtualenv bin directory ends up
early in your path.
Meanwhile - the install to ~/.local : some distros just default to that
behavior whether you ask for it or not, because they consider it unsafe
to install in the system location. Some have chosen to yell at you even
if you try a "user install" with the system Python. Up to them what they
do...
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