GH-108852: Add support for Nushell on virtual environment creation

[hyiltiz]

Add support for Nushell on virtual environment creation

Script originally contributed by @elferherrera and updated by the community (@melMass @fdncred @tusharsadhwani @kubouch @m-lima @WindSoilder @sophiajt @jimporter) to the Virtualenv project [4].

In light of some recent updates in Nushell development, we may be approaching a time to provide support for Nushell:

• Nushell users has been in increasing steadily and uses it in personal and work environments as it is quite stable [1].
• This script is fully tested as part of virtualenv and was stable since May 17, 2023 [2]. During this time, Nushell had 13 minor updates, none of which broke compatility and none required an update to this script [3].

[1] https://www.nushell.sh/blog/2023-11-16-nushell-2023-survey-results.html
[2] pypa/virtualenv#2572
[3] nushell/nushell#9212
[4] https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/commits/main/src/virtualenv/activation/nushell/activate.nu

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• Issue: Support nushell in venv #108852

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📚 Documentation preview 📚: https://cpython-previews--114043.org.readthedocs.build/

[ghost]

All commit authors signed the Contributor License Agreement.

[AA-Turner]

This was previously rejected (see the issue), noting that we would return to the matter "once a stable release is out". Has this situation changed?

For future reference, please do discuss matters on the issue first before opening a new pull request.

A

[hyiltiz]

There is no planned date for Nushell to release a stable 1.0 soon. Given that it reached stability that requires no change to this script for at least 8 months and probably until and after the 1.0 release, it may be feasible to re-evaluate the original decision of waiting until the 1.0 release.

(Should discussion continue here, or in the issue?)

[kubouch]

Nushell maintainer here.

I would advise caution because we still can't guarantee stability until version 1.0. There might still be changes related to overlays.

With virtualenv, we continuously test its integration scripts in our CI and in the case of breaking change, we update them, and a new virtualenv version is released shortly after. This seems to work fine thanks to virtualenv supporting many older Python versions, making it easy to update in most scenarios. On the other hand, if the script is integrated into Python itself, and we release a breaking change, the user would first need to wait for the next Python release, then update Python, which is not always easy or even possible.

[AA-Turner]

On that basis, I'll close the PR for now -- @hyiltiz if you'd like to propose the PR again in the future, please may you first check through the issue, to keep everything in one place?

A