RANT why the *%#&%^ does installing pip not install setuptools???

[eryk sun]

On Thu, Jul 5, 2018 at 5:37 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> I'm trying to install pip on a Linux Mint box. The maintainers of Mint
> (or possibly their upstream distro, Ubuntu) decided in their infinite
> wisdom to remove the ensurepip package, so
>
>     python3 -m ensurepip

In Debian distros, a customized version of ensurepip is part of
python3-venv [1]. But it's only for use in virtual environments; it
doesn't install the upstream version of pip as the system pip. Even
with the customized python3-pip package, it's still recommended to use
the system package manager (apt or dpkg) for the system Python. I only
use pip in local builds and virtual environments, as suggested, so I
can't provide concrete cases in which using it for the system
site-packages actually breaks something due to a version mismatch. Of
course you can remove a package and repair the system if it causes a
conflict, but it's worth a warning at least.

[1]: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/python3-venv