virtualenv's main should take arguments

[k0s]

https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/blob/develop/virtualenv.py#L672

Should be

def main(args=sys.argv[1:]):

where args are later passed to parser.parse_args; this lets virtualenv be (more) meaningfully used as an API

[carljm]

I don't necessarily have a problem with this change - but if you want to use virtualenv as an API just call the existing create_environment() function, that's a much nicer API than putting together a fake sys.argv.

[k0s]

Unfortunately, this doesn't work either since logger is defined in main:

│python -c 'import virtualenv; virtualenv.create_environment("/home/jhammel/foo")'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
File "virtualenv.py", line 647, in create_environment
site_packages=site_packages, clear=clear))
File "virtualenv.py", line 750, in install_python
mkdir(lib_dir)
File "virtualenv.py", line 205, in mkdir
logger.info('Creating %s', path)
NameError: global name 'logger' is not defined

While I would like this change, I'm open to other possibilities, with the caveat that I do (for silly reasons that I can go into if desired) need to run python -c "import virtualenv; ..." rather than some saner method

[carljm]

You must be using an old version of virtualenv. That was fixed last March in ea1786 and works fine in at least 1.6 and up.

[k0s]

Ah, true enough. Thanks!

[chadwhitacre]

I can confirm that the missing global logger is not an issue anymore (I'm using 1.9.1), and that calling create_environment directly works fine. I came here thinking it'd be nice to factor out the checks between the adjust_options hook and the create_environment call or perhaps push them down into create_environment itself, but now I think that it's fine to pick and choose from the behavior represented there because it doesn't all apply to use cases in which one wants to use virtualenv as a library anyway. Configuring the logger could be nicer, but that's a separate issue. I suggest closing this one.

[stale]

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