Look into ways to automatically select environment without specifying `python.pythonPath`

Basically VS Code’s design of having only global and workspace settings means there is no concept of a machine-specific setting when teams standardize on a workspace settings.json. That means we should look at ways to let people either specify the exact way they want their environment to be selected without specifying an absolute path or scale back when we write python.pythonPath to settings.json.

One key thing to keep in mind is that environment discovery can be expensive, so we may need to come up with a solution where people can say, e.g. python.usePipenv or something so we know to short-circuit searching in other ways and only use pipenv.

[eirannejad]

Thank you all for the feedback on this. I’m not fully understanding the challenges behind this but it seems like in most cases, a python project has a venv associated with it so in most cases VSC can just ask the venv manager e.g.pipenv --venv for the python path. In all other cases it can ask the user for the project python path. In either case, the path should not be saved in workspace settings.json. I’d appreciate any help on understanding the issue better. Thanks!

[brettcannon]

@eirannejad not everyone uses a environment management tool, so there’s subtly there. Otherwise explaining is premature as we have not taken the time to write out our own design for the solution yet.