I'm using vscode on macOS and using nix to manage my environment. I do have python3.9 installed via homebrew as my system-default python, but I'm working on a project using a nix environment that is setting my path such that the only python executable available is python 3.8.
$ which python
/nix/store/mr2p1ycgj3wfppbw8ry2wwxg9r0xjz0z-python3-3.8.8-env/bin/python
$ whence python
/nix/store/mr2p1ycgj3wfppbw8ry2wwxg9r0xjz0z-python3-3.8.8-env/bin/python
$ whence python3
/nix/store/mr2p1ycgj3wfppbw8ry2wwxg9r0xjz0z-python3-3.8.8-env/bin/python
$ code .
The VSCode instance that comes up finds my 3.9 install as the default interpreter...
This causes a problem because the interpreter that's put on the path by nix is also the one with all my packages installed for this particular project, including developer utilities like black, flake8, pylint, etc... and my default 3.9 install does not necessarily have those.
It seems like there's a mechanism by which the Python extension discovers various python installs (I see in the extension output things where it tries to source virtualenvs and query pyenv), so what I think is happening is that it's finding a bunch of different python interpreters and blindly defaulting to the newest.
Is there any way to override the way the Python extension discovers python installs? I just want it to use the python interpreter that it finds on the path by default. I know I can override the interpreter per-project via the .vscode/settings.json, but that's a bit tedious to do for every project, and the way nix works that path may change occasionally. I already have "python.pythonPath": "python" in my vscode settings (which is the default anyway) - I was hoping that would work... it does not.