[Distutils] PEP 439 and pip bootstrap updated

[Donald Stufft]

On Jul 11, 2013, at 10:12 PM, Richard Jones <richard at python.org> wrote:

> The point of PEP 439 is that the current situation of "but first do
> this" for any given 3rd-party package installation was a bad thing and
> we desire to move away from it. The PEP therefore proposes to allow
> "just do this" to eventually become the narrative. The direction this
> conversation is heading is removing that very significant primary
> benefit, and I'm not convinced there's any point to the PEP in that
> case.
> 
> 
>    Richard
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig

Now that I think about it some more I agree (and this was one of my sticking points with PyEnvs). There's already an API given to people who want to run a command to install pip:

    ``curl https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py | python``

Now that's platform dependent obviously but even then I don't see anyone documenting people should do that before installing things and I do think that blessing a script like that in the stdlib seems kind of pointless.

The UX of the PEP as written as whenever you want to install something you run ``pip3 install foo``. The fact that pip _isn't_ bundled with Python and is instead fetched from PyPI is an implementation detail. It provides the major benefit of bundling it with Python without tying packaging to the release cycle of the stdlib (which has proven disastrous with distutils).

We should remember that in general people have considered PyEnv that ships with Python 3.3 an inferior alternative to virtualenv largely in part because they have to fetch setuptools and pip prior to using it whereas in virtualenv they do not.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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