Values in pyvenv.cfg do not reflect the real paths on case insensitive file systems

[ofek]

I noticed this because within a virtual environment the paths that sysconfig returns are in all caps for some reason:

home = C:\USERS\OFEK\APPDATA\LOCAL\PROGRAMS\PYTHON\PYTHON311
implementation = CPython
version_info = 3.11.1.final.0
virtualenv = 20.25.0
include-system-site-packages = false
base-prefix = C:\USERS\OFEK\APPDATA\LOCAL\PROGRAMS\PYTHON\PYTHON311
base-exec-prefix = C:\USERS\OFEK\APPDATA\LOCAL\PROGRAMS\PYTHON\PYTHON311
base-executable = C:\USERS\OFEK\APPDATA\LOCAL\PROGRAMS\PYTHON\PYTHON311\PYTHON.EXE

This might not seem like a big deal but users see these paths in debug output when building packages if the build uses virtual environments.

[ofek]

Saving the resolved paths like this issue wants would also fix this because os.path.realpath returns the path as saved on disk.

[gaborbernat]

PR welcome to address this is welcome 👍

[ofek]

Can you please point to the general area of the code base that I should look at?

[gaborbernat]

Either https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/tree/main/src/virtualenv/create/via_global_ref/builtin or https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/blob/main/src/virtualenv/discovery/py_info.py#L35

[ofek]

I don't know why but upgrading from 3.11.1 to 3.11.7 fixed the issue.

[pelson]

Would this equally have been solved by calling os.path.normpath? I ask because the use of os.path.realpath (instead of recursively calling os.readlink) in #2686 is problematic and diverges from venv (and now uv venv).