Re: Managing environments (Python venv, guix environment, etc.)

[sbaugh]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
>> Like Eli said, this seems unwise. But it hints at a logical problem: if 
>> start-process and friends are simply documented to use exec-path and 
>> process-environment, but use their modified values in some 
>> circumstances, someone trying to debug this could have a big problem.
>
> One possible idea is to identify the programs that an environment
> would like to depend on it (like the compiler), define a variable for
> each one of them (compiler-program etc.), and then modify the
> corresponding commands to use that variable, if bound to non-nil, in
> preference to exec-path search.

The environment also matters, so you'd need to have a
compiler-process-environment too.

Note: The compile command already makes use of a compilation-environment
variable.

That would work, but again, it means updating the entire world to
support this. Also, if we're going to update the world: Perhaps just add
buffer-local variables "local-exec-path" and
"local-process-environment", and flags like
"compile-use-local-environment" which if non-nil cause the relevant
command, when invoked, to use the local-exec-path and
local-process-environment variables from (current-buffer). That seems
more natural to me.