venv: --copies?

[gkze]

Got it to compile on Nix (was a pain because of openssl-sys :) ). Now the problem is the venv being constructed with symlinks instead of copies. Would it make sense to have a --copies/--symlinks a la venv? Or symlink the core installation and write installed packages to the venv instead of the system directory?

[Vigilans]

I am mounting my home directory to devcontainer to reuse my user configs, and I have a venv dedicated for my user. Without --copies to create a self contained venv, the user-wide venv may not find the python through the symlink, or symlinked to different version in the devcontainer.

[konstin]

We're now supporting uv venv --link-mode copy, which will copy the installed packages, even though we're still symlinking the python interpreter.

[zanieb]

Is this still an issue because we're not copying the interpreter? Should we respect --link-mode for the interpreter too?

[SecT0uch]

Is this still an issue because we're not copying the interpreter? Should we respect --link-mode for the interpreter too?

I'm trying to resolve an issue where .venv in subfolders are not aromatically detected by vscode and saw that comment microsoft/vscode-python#14592 (comment)

I'm not sure this is the source of my issue, but I wanted to try a copy with the interpreter included

[wkrettek]

I used uv to bootstrap python for an old embedded armv7 platform that had no python3 or package manager. My goal was to create a venv folder that was portable enough such that I could deploy it to this platform multiple times without internet or needing the uv binary installed.

I tried forcing it by copying the interpreter into my venv folder but it seemed like some libraries were still linked or missing. I eventually set my UV_PYTHON_INSTALL_DIR to install in my project directory and created a new venv so it looked like this

project_dir
|- cpython-3.12.7-linux-armv7-gnueabihf/
|- venv/
|- my_python_script.py

This is the closest I could get to a portable project when bootstrapping with uv. If it's possible to build a venv that has copies of the interpreter and its libraries together I would be forced to sing uv's praises from the mountaintops.

[eabase]

This is also in line with my proposal in #11773