[Python-Dev] updating ensurepip to include wheel

[Donald Stufft]

> On Aug 7, 2015, at 11:13 AM, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> 
>> Please don't add extra pain for purity and
>> make sure that ensurepip installs "pip" and
>> not "slow pip until you install wheel in the venv".
> 
> 
> This is a really good point -- other than purity, what is the downside?
> 
> Arguably, the only reason setuptools, pip, and wheel are not in the
> standard library are because the need a more rapid development/release
> cycle.
> 
> Ensurepip is the way to get the best of both worlds -- why not make it complete?
> 

So my opinion is basically that in a vacuum I would absolutely add wheel to ensurepip (and I did add wheel to get-pip.py and to virtualenv). However, this does not exist in a vacuum and there is still animosity about PEP 453 and downstream’s are still trying to figure out how they are going to handle it for real. During the 3.4 release there were downstream redisttibutors who completely removed ensurepip and were talking about possibly removing pip entirely from their archives.

So my hesitation is basically that I consider is a short (or medium) term need until pip can implicitly install wheel and setuptools as part of the build process for a particular project and I worry that it will reopen some wounds and cause more strife.

I do however think it would make ensurepip itself better, so I’m not dead set against it, mostly just worried about ramifications.