Respect interpreter in `PATH`

Even if it’s not via PATH, we would like programmatic selection of python interpreter for a single VS Code instance.

We would like to invoke an instance of VS Code with a specific python interpreter, because that allows providing Python modules for just that instance of VS Code. Currently, once an interpreter has been selected for a workspace, there is no way to choose another interpreter other than running Python: Select Interpreter from the command palette. It would be much more convenient if we could automate that - e.g. when our Python requirements change, we script updating the interpreter in PATH, and no manual intervention is required.

Even if PATH is not respected, some other possibilities would be respecting python.defaultInterpreterPath in .vscode/settings.json, a command line argument, or another environment variable.

Some more details are in https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/issues/19298, @karrtikr thanks for your help there

[mkenigs]

I want to be able to tell someone, run XXX command, and I’ll know they have the proper Python interpreter. I have no way of knowing whether or not they’ve previously run Python: Select Interpreter or not

[karthiknadig]

Thanks for the feature request! We are going to give the community 60 days from when this issue was created to provide 7 👍 upvotes on the opening comment to gauge general interest in this idea. If there’s enough upvotes then we will consider this feature request in our future planning. If there’s unfortunately not enough upvotes then we will close this issue.