[Python-Dev] PEP 477: selected ensurepip backports for Python 2.7

[Nick Coghlan]

On 1 Sep 2014 09:23, "Benjamin Peterson" <benjamin at python.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Aug 31, 2014, at 16:17, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> > On Mon, 1 Sep 2014 08:00:14 +1000
> > Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > That part of the proposal proved to be controversial, so we dropped
it from
> > > the original PEP in order to focus on meeting the Python 3.4 specific
> > > release deadlines. This also had the benefit of working out the kinks
in
> > > the bootstrapping processing as part of the Python 3.4 release cycle.
> > >
> > > However, we still think we should start providing pip by default to
Python
> > > 2.7 users as well, at least as part of the Windows and Mac OS X
installers.
> >
> > I don't agree with this. pip is simply not part of the 2.7 feature set.
> > If you add pip to a bugfix version, then you have bugfix versions which
> > are more featureful than others, which makes things more complicated to
> > explain.
>
> 2.7.x has been and will be alive for so long that will already have to
> explain that sort thing; i.e. PEP 466 and why different bugfix releases
> support different versions of dependency libraries.

Exactly. LTS is genuinely different from stopping maintenance after the
next feature release - it requires considering the "stability risk" and
"user experience improvement" questions separately.

In this case, the problem is that the Python 2 platform *is* still
evolving, but the centre of that evolution has moved to PyPI. For "standard
library only" users, Python 2 stopped evolving back in 2010. For PyPI
users, by contrast, it's still evolving at a rapid pace.

For our Python 3 transition story to be coherent, we need to ensure tools
like six, modernize and future are readily available, while still remaining
free to evolve independently of the standard library. That means providing
a package management utility as easily and as painlessly as possible.

Embracing pip upstream for Python 2 as well as Python 3 also sends a
powerful signal to redistributors that says "your users are going to need
this" and makes them do additional work to *avoid* providing it. Some of
them *will* choose that path, but that becomes a matter for discussion
between them and their user base, rather than a problem we need to worry
about upstream.

Cheers,
Nick.


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