Change venvFolders to no longer be anchored to the user's home directory

[brettcannon]

We discovered during our bug bash that venvFolders exists but isn't documented. Either we leave it, document it, and potentially not make (at least) our pyenv support depend on .pyenv being in it, or we remove the setting and use the documented functionality of pyenv directly.

[brettcannon]

1. Make pyenv and direnv support not rely on venvFolders
2. Create venvPaths which is an array of directories which contain virtual environments
3. Deprecate venvFolders and venvPath
4. Make sure environments list gets updated when settings change

[brettcannon]

#2142 is a motivator for venvPaths available.

[brettcannon]

We may want to consider skipping step 2 and modifying step 3 to only worry about venvPath as the naming of venvFolders makes a little bit more sense in isolation then venvPaths.

[ericsnowcurrently]

For reference: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/environments#_where-the-extension-looks-for-environments

[brettcannon]

Since we now know how to patch a user's setting we can actually drop venvPath and then change a user's preexisting settings to append ~/ to entries (or something along those lines).

[brettcannon]

Once this is done we will also need to request appropriate documentation (as well as for WORKON_HOME).

[claytonlemons]

I ran across this issue because I have the following use case:

• rootWorkspaceDir (not relative to homeDir)
  • subProject1Dir
    • venvDIr
  • subProject2Dir
    • venvDIr

Making venvFolders not relative to the user's home dir would allow me to specify each subproject once and easily switch between the corresponding environments as I switch between projects. The current workaround is to update venvPath or pythonPath each time I switch.

[leifwalsh]

What's the current status of this? venvFolders and venvPath still exist, and are inconsistently documented:

• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/environments#_where-the-extension-looks-for-environments only mentions venvPath
• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/settings-reference#_general-python-settings only mentions venvFolders (but not the fact that it's relative to your homedir)

I thought the original plan, to make venvPaths an array of entries like venvPath works today, and to get rid of venvFolders, made sense. It's the least surprising (can be relative to ${workspaceFolder} or not), and supporting multiple entries makes it work with many tools, other filesystems mounted outside one's home directory or project root, etc. It could be overridden in .code-workspace or settings.json files for projects to provide good defaults in source.

Did this ticket just get forgotten about? It would very much improve my company's use cases to see this happen.

[Dris101]

Just got caught out by this again! If using poetry, set python.venvPath to the output of poetry config virtualenvs.path (might need to change \ to / on Windows)

[thecircleoflifefree]

Any rule of thumb of how I should be using one or the other and both?

[brettcannon]

Did this ticket just get forgotten about?

Honestly, yes. We have been very focused in the interim time this issue was opened by completely rewriting the environment discovery code, iterating on the quick pick menu, and then getting an extension API for other extensions to use. Now that's all finished, we can look to try and pick this up in 2023.

[leifwalsh]

Cool, thank you!

[rhewy]

Should venvPaths exist in version v2023.14.0 of the python extension?

[brettcannon]

Should venvPaths exist in version v2023.14.0 of the python extension?

No; see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/blob/main/package.json for all the settings we support.