[Python-ideas] High time for a builtin function to manage packages (simply)?

[Paul Moore]

On 9 September 2015 at 23:40, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> At the very least, surely this could be "fixed" by detecting this case
> and exiting with a message "Sorry, Windows is annoying and this isn't
> going to work, to upgrade pip please type 'python -m pip ...'
> instead"? That seems more productive in the short run than trying to
> get everyone to stop typing "pip" :-). (Though I do agree that having
> pip as a separate command from python is a big mess -- another case
> where this comes up is the need for pip versus pip3.)

That's already done (without the unnecessary passive-aggressive
sniping at Windows) and we still get users raising bugs because they
didn't read the message, or because they misinterpreted something.

As I said, we've tried lots of solutions. What we haven't had yet is
anyone come up with an actual working PR that fixes the issue (in the
sense of addressing the bug reports we get) better than the current
code (if we had, we'd have applied the PR).

Paul