wishlist: option to selectively link a few global site-packages

[Carl Meyer]

It would be really slick to be able to selectively specify a few global site-packages to link into the virtualenv, while ignoring the rest. I often find that I have a couple dependencies which are compiled C code, flaky to install inside the virtualenv, and always available via my OS package manager. I'd like to be able to just link those into the virtualenv while ignoring all other global packages. (Of course this can be done manually right now, but it'd be nice to automate it).

[Ian Bicking (ianb)]

I'd be open to this option in pip (though I'm not 100% sure what the command would look like), but it doesn't really fit into the scope of virtualenv.

[Carl Meyer (carljm)]

OK. I thought it fit alongside --no-site-packages, i.e. I could do "virtualenv --no-site-packages my_new_venv" or instead "virtualenv --site-packages=PIL,psycopg2 my_new_venv". But if that's out of scope for virtualenv I'll file a wishlist issue on pip's Trac.

[Ian Bicking (ianb)]

From a workflow perspective it never made sense to me in virtualenv, because then if you miss a package, do you recreate the environment? Or if you add a package to the system? virtualenv is more a run-once tool, and pip more a run-many tool.

[Carl Meyer (carljm)]

Wontfix - not porting this to new issue tracker at github.com/pypa/virtualenv