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

[sbaugh]

> If M-x compile obeys dir-locals that could work, yes.

I checked (by creating a .dir-locals.el containing a setting for the
exec-path variable in compliation-mode) and it doesn't seem to read
exec-path from dir-locals.

> Another option is to use process-file's file-name-handler-alist.

So we'd maintain a mapping from visited filenames to the environment
that that filename is in, and make sure that visited filenames in a
nonstandard environment are present in file-name-handler-alist.

Tying environments to filenames in this way makes sense when an
environment corresponds to a project which exists in the filesystem. In
that case we can just put the project root directory into
file-name-handler-alist, and instantly everything in the project works
in the new environment.

And for running one-off commands (to send my mail, or something else not
associated with any project) I've always been able to just wrap the
command with a let-binding of exec-path and process-environment. (The
environment package could provide a new macro to do that)

So then there would be two ways to enter a different environment for Emacs:
One for projects and based on file-name-handler-alist, and one for single
commands and based on let-binding. I think that would be enough to start.

Does this approach (putting project root directories into
file-name-handler-alist) sound like something that could be accepted
into core Emacs? If so I'll get started.

Also, in the future, it would be nice to have the ability to just run
(something like) "M-x environment-switch" to switch the current buffer
to a new environment, and have an invocation of e.g. "M-x compile" just
work. Does anyone have any thoughts about how to eventually support
that? Is there a clever way to do it, or will we just have to end up
rewriting the world?

> And of course, yet another is to advice-add on call-process and
> start-process.

Yeah, but I'd like to be able to get this into Emacs (hopefully by 26).


Thanks for the advice!