Automatically load environments?

[garrison]

On Slack, there was discussion about whether julia should automatically load an environment if one exists in the current directory upon julia startup. I mentioned that direnv is my favorite mechanism for automatically loading/unloading environments within my shell, and it would be awesome to see julia support for it. (For instance, putting layout python3 in a directory's .envrc will automatically activate a virtualenv specific to the project when the directory is entered, and unload it when the directory is left.)

One thing direnv does is require the user to say direnv allow . before it will activate the environment. This is a security feature, so that code is never loaded against the user's consent. Any mechanism within Pkg should also make sure it does not permit the execution of arbitrary code without the user's consent.

[StefanKarpinski]

I did some reading about direnv and it's quite nice. It led me to thinking that perhaps we should not do the CurrentEnv thing inside of Julia at all and instead let people use tools like direnv to set things up this way themselves. It seems like the direnv folks have worked this out better anyway...

[KristofferC]

Fixed in Base.

[garrison]

For anyone else interested in using direnv with Pkg: I have opened a work-in-progress pull request with direnv to add julia support to its stdlib.