[Distutils] The future of invoking pip
Wolfgang Maier
wolfgang.maier at biologie.uni-freiburg.de
Fri Nov 6 12:22:09 EST 2015
On 11/05/2015 10:08 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
>
> * There is a lot of documentation out there in many projects that tell people
> to use ``pip install ...``, the long tail on getting people moved to this
> will be very long.
>
The deprecation period will probably have to be long, but the current
situation is not so bad that you could not live with it for a bit longer.
> * It's more to type, 10 more characters on *nix and 6 more characters on
> Windows which makes it more akward and annoying to use. This is particularly
> annoying inside of a virtual environment where there isn't really any
> ambiguity when one is activated.
>
I have no problem with the extra characters, just as I don't have a
problem with typing: java -jar xy.jar
The extra typing might be annoying for the pypa devs, but remember that
many regular users have to type this only once in a while when they
install some new package. For them, its far more important that things
work reliably than with the shortest possible command.
> * It still has the annoyance around having multiple pip installs all over the
> place and needing to manage those.
>
Another experts problem. People who are just using "Python" and a few
third-party packages are not suffering from this. Once they get to a
level where they use multiple versions of python, they will be able to
cope with the multiple pip installations.
> * We still support Python 2.6 which doesn't support executing a package only
> modules via ``-m``. So we'll break Python 2.6 unless people do
> ``python -m pip.__main__`` or we move pip/* to _pip/* and make a pip.py which
> will break things for people using pip as a library (which isn't currently
> supported).
>
How much longer are you planning to support Python 2.6? Why not just
deprecate pip and pipX.Y (emit a warning to users) for newer versions of
Python. Then once you drop Python 2.6 support remove pip and pipX.Y.
python -m pip ... may not read that beautifully, but if lack of beauty
is the last remaining problem to Python packaging, then that's a reason
to celebrate, isn't it.
Best,
Wolfgang
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