[Distutils] Q about best practices now (or near future)

[Donald Stufft]

On Jul 17, 2013, at 6:30 PM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> It's good that distil exists as a proof of concept, but the ship has sailed 
> on the default language level installer: it will be pip.
> 
> I understand that it's your call as the packaging czar, but was there any 
> discussion about this before the decision was made? Any pros and cons of 
> different approaches weighed up? Python 3.4 beta is still 5-6 months away. 
> Call me naive, but I would normally have expected a PEP on the bundling of pip 
> to be produced by an interested party/champion, then that people would discuss 
> and refine the PEP on the mailing list, and *then* a pronouncement would be 
> made. This is what PEP 1 describes as the PEP process. Instead, it seems a 
> decision has already been made, and now an author/champion for a PEP is being 
> sought ex post facto. With all due respect, this seems back to front - so it 
> would be good to have a better understanding of the factors that went into the 
> decision, including the timing of it. Can you shed some light on this?
> 
> Thanks and regards,
> 
> Vinay Sajip
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig

I think bundling pip or bundling nothing is the only thing that makes sense. There
actually *is* a PEP however it took a different approach that has been (during the
discussions about it) decided that a different way would be less error prone and
more suitable. So now someone to write a PEP for that *new* way is being sought
out. So it's not so much that a pronouncement was made prior to a PEP being
written, but that a PEP was written, discussed, and a better way was found during
that discussion.

As far as I know you're free to make a competing PEP if you'd like. However I think
the chances of it getting accepted are very low because the goal here is user
convenience. It's hard to argue that pip isn't the installer with the most buy in in
the community and thus bundling it (as opposed to a different installer) is the
most convient thing for the most users. In many ways this makes things better for
alternative installers because it gives a simple unified command to installing that
third party installer without needing to handle bootstrapping. However because pip
is bundled an alternative installer will likely need to provide significant benefits
over pip in order to gain critical mass.

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

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