[Distutils] pip vs easy_install vs distutils2

[P.J. Eby]

At 01:13 AM 5/29/2010 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>The problem I have with this approach is that we need to manage
>somewhere at PyPI a list of potential installers,
>and maybe deal with upgrades and replacements. Plus, I am not sure
>that a user will really understand what to
>do when he's asked to chose an installer. Sounds like something we
>should only ask to power users, and
>people that know what they are doing with p7g. So a bootstrap script
>is useless for them.

Actually, the way it would (presumably) work would be just a script 
like Guido's that downloads a source archive from PyPI and runs 
setup.py install.  So, it's not really a matter of "choosing" an 
installer -- it'd just be, "download and install a package from source".

If the package itself needs one of those other things in order to 
build itself or install dependencies, then the next stage of 
bootstrap is its problem (e.g. via ez_setup), not the stdlib's.

So, I don't see the "power users only" objection making sense, at 
least if we drop back to what I believe was Guido's original proposal 
for a bootstrap script a few years ago.