Warn when running in a virtual environment that was created for a different minor Python version

[FFY00]

Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

Environment paths change between minor Python version. When a virtual environment's base Python installation gets updated, the site-packages directories, for eg, will be different, meaning Python won't be able to access any previously installed packages (nor would we want to, as they may be incompatible).

On these situations, we could issue a warning suggesting the user to run python -m venv --upgrade.

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

No response given

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

[User21T]

Hello. As far as I know, the only way to update the virtual environment's base Python installation is to create a new environment with updated Python, using venv. Then, after installing dependencies required by our project via pip, we migrate project files from the old environment to the new one. That may include pyvenv.cfg which still has information about old environment's Python version.
But before brainstorming, I would like to know one thing: how should the new environment's Python interpreter recognize that it is working with a project from the old environment?

[FFY00]

As far as I know, the only way to update the virtual environment's base Python installation is to create a new environment with updated Python, using venv.

You can do this in the same prefix via python -m venv --upgrade.

But before brainstorming, I would like to know one thing: how should the new environment's Python interpreter recognize that it is working with a project from the old environment?

By looking at the version (used by venv) and version_info (used by virtualenv) keys in pyvenv.cfg.

[User21T]

@FFY00 Thank you for explanation.