Great tool, let's keep it alive and bump an update?

[eabase]

I love this tool, and use it on all my machines. Seeing, however, that it's not receiving much attention, perhaps it would be a good idea to give it a small heart-beat update, just to show the community that it's still alive.

@fohrloop
What do you think?

[fohrloop]

Hi @eabase , nice to hear you like venvlink!

I wrote this few years ago when I was still working on Windows. I had a need to keep the virtual environments out of automatic OneDrive sync, and the other alternatives only supported linux. Nowadays, I use practically only linux, and I have had no needs for venvlink. I would be happy to merge the functionality to an existing project, or perhaps be somehow involved in the future development of this package, but honestly I have currently quite small interest on the Windows side.

The implementation of venvlink is actually really simple, and it is merely a single wrapper around venv + some command line interface. The only value of venvlink is probably only in the package name(?) and documentation. Making venvlink support linux would be a nice update, but it would probably be easier to just write a venvlink-linux from ground up than to update the code to be multiplatform-supported as it would require some refactoring and tests.

So in summary, this tool works and can be used as is. As I have no use for this anymore personally, I probably have difficulties finding time on this from my other projects, unfortunately. Thanks for the suggestion, and If you or someone else wants to develop this further, I could move this repo and/or add rights for merging PRs and uploading new versions to PyPI.

• Niko

[eabase]

@fohrloop

Thanks for getting back to us. For sure, it's sad if it can no longer maintained. Unfortunately, I'm in a similar situation as you, with a large number of my own repos I no longer have time to maintain. The only thing I can say is that since this is made in python, it should be fairly platform agnostic and should work equally well on a *nix OS.

[eabase]

There is now a very fast python package manager called uv:
https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

However, they still fail on the virtual environment handling! Given the non-maintained status of this, I will ask if they could incorporate this functionality into that package.

However, they are also trying to do too many things at once, and already have >100 issues, so I think it's unlikely that they will be able to fix this in the foreseeable future. Until then I will keep using this.

[fohrloop]

That looks like a cool project! It would be awesome if virtual environments by a link would be a thing in other tools as well!

[eabase]

FYI ❤
astral-sh/uv#11773

[fohrloop]

Thanks for sharing this. I'm also using uv and it would be awesome if the functionality of venvlink was available in uv!

[eabase]

Hi Niko,

FYI. We're currently in a discussion in this uv issue:

• Add an option to store virtual environments in a centralized location outside projects astral-sh/uv#1495

I'm trying to push for better support and perhaps using venvlink to better align with uv. However, it's also a bit sketchy because it's not clear where the uv devs want to go, and we lack feedback from them, and venvlink I have been using happily every and all day for the last 4+ years...