Support symlink Python environments

Hello, we have been using Hermit to install portable versions of python and this is working great except that with VS Code we can not select that python as an interpreter.

For example /Users/damien/Development/example/bin/python3 because in reality it is:

python3 -> [e-mail]
pip3 -> [e-mail]
 [e-mail] -> hermit

I think this is similar to https://github.com/Dart-Code/Dart-Code/issues/3961

❯ code --version
1.67.1
da15b6fd3ef856477bf6f4fb29ba1b7af717770d
arm64

[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.

[gandhis1]

So regarding the conda issues I mentioned above, stepped through the extension host debugger. The way the extension currently works is that when you “Select Interpreter”, it derives an executablePath, and a envPath. In the function resolveCondaEnv, it iterates through all the conda environments, and compares the paths to that environment - if they are the same, per the function areSameEnv, then it uses the info of that environment to construct and return a PythonEnvInfo object. If none of the environments are matched, then it calls resolveSimpleEnv which then uses the directory name as the name of the environment.

• One possible fix might be to update the function areSameEnv to consider symlinks. However the environment resolution is cached, and I am not aware of any mechanism here that would know to re-resolve the environment if the symlink changes, which it could at any point in time. So I’m not sure this would work without more changes.
• The other possible fix is to update resolveSimpleEnv to NOT set the name of the environment, leaving it as an empty string for consistency with non-symlink paths. Later code that invokes conda passes a name if a name is not a null or empty value, but if it is, then it passes a path - this is the behavior we want. Because resolveSimpleEnv is only ever called from resolveCondaEnv, the impact of this change would be limited.

I’m thinking the second solution is what we need.