Did the '--no-site-packages' flag recently disappear?

[gvanrossum]

Some readthedocs jobs recently started failing with a complaint from virtualenv about --no-site-packages (readthedocs/readthedocs.org#6725). It seems readthedocs passes this flag unless --system-site-packages is requested. From the logs it seems there used to be a flag by this name, and then its behavior was made the default (around 2012?), but the flag was kept. Did it recently get removed? I can't quite nail it by grepping the logs, but this code has apparently been in readthedocs for ages.

Python 3.7 on Linux.

[gvanrossum]

OK, it looks like it disappeared in 20.0.0. Can't find a trace of it there, but it's present in 16.7.9. Since that answers my question, I'll close this. Sorry for the noise!

[gaborbernat]

Hello, you can still find the legacy (v16) documentation here https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/legacy/reference.html. v20 aimes to be cli compatible with v16 baring some flags that have been deprecated for years now. https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/legacy/reference.html#cmdoption-no-site-packages is one of this, so we've dropped it during the migration to the new major version. We're sorry if this caused issues for you, you're right we should have mentioned it somewhere in our release changelog though.

[vietvudanh]

Have just met this issue too, not much a problem since I find it early but it should be in released notes.

[gaborbernat]

@vietvudanh I'm a bit surprised how this long-deprecated no-op flag is still used by people 😱

[vietvudanh]

@gaborbernat I did not explicitly use the flag myself, spark-submit command from Apache Spark is what caused the error when I upgraded virtualenv to use pyspark.

Well, I think I might be the only one to have this problem with our offline Spark cluster (v2.3.2, HDP stack v3.1), and I am the only Python dev in our mostly Scalar dev team.