"pixi global install" should support constraints

[ctcjab]

Repro

1. Run pixi global install conda-lock
2. Invoke the resulting conda-lock that gets installed
3. Observe that you hit the following bug: SyntaxWarning on Python 3.12 conda/conda-lock#677
4. Note this could be worked around if you could somehow pass a python=3.11 constraint to the pixi global install invocation (much like you can pass --python=3.11 to a uv tool install invocation)

Thanks for your consideration and for the amazing work on pixi!

[Hofer-Julian]

Thanks for the issue.

This will be fixed as soon as https://pixi.sh/latest/design_proposals/pixi_global_manifest/ is released

[ctcjab]

Nice, took a quick look, and shareable global environments coupled with non-imperative-only management sounds very interesting. At work I'm eventually hoping to provide all developers here with a base environment of common devtools, plus associated default configuration for them, which I can centrally manage. I was thinking of using the nix ecosystem for this (and try to paper over some of its complexity for my users), but I wonder if pixi could be a better alternative someday.

Looking forward to taking a look once there is something ready to try. (I'll keep an eye on this issue to find out when, unless I should watch some other one.)

[ruben-arts]

@ctcjab Cool! For non NixOS usecases pixi will be really close! But it should be much more comfortable. I'll close this issue for now as it is already part of the design! Thanks for dropping by!

[ctcjab]

Nice, and thank you for all the great work on pixi.

With this issue closed, is there another one I can watch to find out when there's something ready for me to test? I looked through https://github.com/prefix-dev/pixi/issues?q=global+manifest but didn't spot one.

[Hofer-Julian]

@ctcjab The feature branch can be found here: #1833

At the moment, it will remove your currently installed binaries, but that will change soon.

Any testing is much appreciated 🙏🏻

[ctcjab]

Just saw the new pixi global implementation was released in v0.33.0, and tried to take advantage of it to work around the bug mentioned in the description by running:

pixi global install -e conda-lock conda-lock python=3.11

This successfully worked around the bug, but it also exposed a bunch of executables (from python) that I do not want exposed[1].

Is there any way to get the conda-lock environment to use python3.11 to satisfy conda-lock's python dependency without exposing the executables that python provides? I checked the docs and --help output and didn't see any --no-expose option. Hoping I can now use pixi to get the same result as uv tool install --python=3.11 conda-lock (i.e. only expose conda-lock globally and just internally use python3.11 for that environment), but not sure it's possible yet.

Thanks for any help, and congrats on the new release!

[1] namely:

   - 2to3
   - 2to3-3.11
   - idle3
   - idle3.11
   - pydoc
   - pydoc3
   - pydoc3.11
   - python
   - python3
   - python3-config
   - python3.1
   - python3.11
   - python3.11-config

[Hofer-Julian]

@ctcjab You can run the following in order to only expose conda-lock:

pixi global install --environment conda-lock --expose conda-lock conda-lock python=3.11

[ctcjab]

Thanks @Hofer-Julian, that worked!

Sorry I missed that. I re-read the https://pixi.sh/latest/features/global_tools/#exposed docs and, now that I know this, it's clear enough from "but you want to get a select few". Perhaps an example with multiple packages in the same env would have made it clearer, or maybe just adding the word "only"?

In any case, thanks again, and great work on the latest version.