Ah, yes: things in the environment can wink out of existence as well–newtorks, files’[sic] URLs, license keys, users, printers–you name it.
Pragmatic Unit Testing
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open it to page 56.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
WARNING: DO NOT REPRODUCE THIS BUG WITHOUT REALIZING THE CONSEQUENCES!
I recently had a good need for using virtualenv due working on multiple Django projects. With that, I decided to use virtualenvwrapper as well. I absolutely love these too programs since they make managing different environments extremely easy. Virtualenv provides a great sandbox area where I can install all the python packages a want without messing up any other environment. Virtualenvwrapper provides some commands to easily work with multiple virtualenvs.
While first testing virtualenvwrapper, I created several virtualenvs, switched to different ones, and then tried deleting one. Then I found the nastiest of bug. If no arguments are given to rmvirtualenv, it deletes $WORKON_HOME and all environments.
I am bad a running a command without the arguments and I really don’t want to lose everything. I am just glad I found this before actually putting real stuff in any enviroments.
I updated virtualenvwrapper to print an error message instead of deleting everything and emailed it to Doug Hellmann, the creator of virtualenvwrapper. He said he will put out a new version this weekend.
Other than this issue, I love virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper.