The discussion of different types of environments in the CLI API thread reminded me:
When reading the current version of PEP 832, I’d initially assumed that of course I would be able to write the path of a conda environment into the .venv file and tools/IDEs would handle that just like the path to a (non-conda) virtual environment. It took me a while to realise that’s not actually true.
This has significant potential for confusion: Apart from the different invocation[1], my experience (from my own day-to-day usage as well as observing colleagues and hundreds of learners in training courses) is that the differences between these environment types rarely matters in day-to-day usage. Even e.g. the environment selector in VSCode list conda and virtual environments alongside each other peacefully; and in casual speech, I regularly hear people say “virtual environment” to refer to conda environments or as a generic term for both.
If it’s not possible for the PEP to support both environment types[2], I think it would at least be good to be explicit about this limitation to reduce confusion.