We have this ticket in #17434, that the user was affected by their powershell profile changing the cwd. This could be avoided by -noProfile, but as @Todiq points out in #17434 (comment), this might break users that rely on this.

We could add yet another conf, or maybe allow users to do tools.env.virtualenv:powershell="powershell -noProfile" or any other arguments they might want to provide?

I can think of two alternatives:

• Using a dict instead a str and passing the shell and arguments, so it would be like:

tools.env.virtualenv:powershell={"shell": "pwsh", "args": ["-NoProfile", "-ExecutionPolicy", "Bypass"]}

or

tools.env.virtualenv:powershell={"shell": "powershell.exe", "args": ["-NoProfile", "-ExecutionPolicy", "Bypass"]}

• Using a new conf for arguments:

tools.env.virtualenv:powershell_args=["-NoProfile", "-ExecutionPolicy", "Bypass"]

What do you think? @memsharded @AbrilRBS

I'd probably go for the 1 configuration if we still support the basic string simple case, good for vast majority of users: tools.env.virtualenv:powershell=pwsh, because defining a dict in the command line is always painful with the quoting. Then I like 1 configuration to avoid explosion of confs, and if it needs some further argument or variation we can just add them to the dict.

I'd probably go for the 1 configuration if we still support the basic string simple case, good for vast majority of users: tools.env.virtualenv:powershell=pwsh, because defining a dict in the command line is always painful with the quoting. Then I like 1 configuration to avoid explosion of confs, and if it needs some further argument or variation we can just add them to the dict.

Let's try with the simpler version of using a string like tools.env.virtualenv:powershell="powershell.exe -noProfile" because it's true that dicts are not the best for passing in the CLI.

I agree - we just might want to make sure the docs mention that you're only ever supposed to use powershell.exe/pwsh.exe