virtualenv --no-site-packages and pip still finding global packages?

Question

I was under the impression that virtualenv --no-site-packages would create a completely separate and isolated Python environment, but it doesn't seem to.

For example, I have python-django installed globally, but wish to create a virtualenv with a different Django version.

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages foo       
New python executable in foo/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
$ pip -E foo install Django
Requirement already satisfied: Django in /usr/share/pyshared
Installing collected packages: Django
Successfully installed Django

From what I can tell, the pip -E foo install above is supposed to re-install a new version of Django. Also, if I tell pip to freeze the environment, I get a whole lot of packages. I would expect that for a fresh environment with --no-site-packages this would be blank?

$ pip -E foo freeze
4Suite-XML==1.0.2
BeautifulSoup==3.1.0.1
Brlapi==0.5.3
BzrTools==1.17.0
Django==1.1
... and so on ...

Am I misunderstanding how --no-site-packages is supposed to work?

Answer 1

--no-site-packes should, as the name suggests, remove the standard site-packages directory from sys.path. Anything else that lives in the standard Python path will remain there.

Answer 2

Eventually I found that, for whatever reason, pip -E was not working. However, if I actually activate the virtualenv, and use easy_install provided by virtualenv to install pip, then use pip directly from within, it seems to work as expected and only show the packages in the virtualenv