Potential clarification for creating virtualenv

[chinyeungli]

For this line,
https://github.com/aboutcode-org/scancode-toolkit/blob/develop/docs/source/getting-started/newcomer.rst?plain=1#L80

and a virtualenv is created

I found this a bit confusing—it initially sounds like I need to create a virtual environment before installing SCTK. However, according to the official guide (https://scancode-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting-started/install.html), users don’t need to do anything other than run scancode -h. Alternatively, if SCTK has already been installed, the correct step is to activate the virtual environment with ./venv/bin/activate.

Select Category

• Inconsistency
• New Section Request
• General Improvement
• Typo/Mistakes
• Other

[chinyeungli]

@AyanSinhaMahapatra
https://scancode-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting-started/newcomer.html#before-you-start-using-scancode
Is activating the "virtualenv" before using scancode-toolkit a valid statement for all the installation methods?

Because it seems I can run sctk just by ./scancode ..... without activating the venv

[AyanSinhaMahapatra]

@chinyeungli good catch, we only need to explicitly install a virtualenv by ourself if we are doing a pip install, and this is explained in the details. For source code install/app archive install we don't need this as the configure/scancode scripts are installing the virtualenv by themselves, and the docker install does not require a virtualenv as well. We can remove virtualenv from the introduction part.