[Python-Dev] Deprecate PEP 370 Per user site-packages directory?

[Brett Cannon]

On Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 17:27 Alex Walters, <tritium-list at sdamon.com> wrote:

> I would suggest throwing this to -ideas, rather than just keeping it in
> -dev
> as there is a much wider community of users and usecases in -ideas.
>
> ... and -ideas will shoot it down because user installs are too useful.  It
> is also my understanding that it is the desire of PyPA to eventually have
> pip default to --user when run outside of a virtualenv (to mitigate people
> running sudo pip).  Eliminating user installs would change the situation
> from one where, with pip install --user, one can recoverably break their
> system to one, with sudo pip install, one can un-recoverably break their
> system.
>

Which suggests that doing away with user installs would mean making it so
interpreter installs don't break your system, which would require Linux and
distros and macOS to not publicly expose their system Python installs so
people can't accidentally break them. I think if that were to occur then
you could consider dropping user installs as people would be installing
into their own interpreter. But until then I think the attraction/lack of
knowledge for people will be high enough that user installs will be the
most pragmatic solution we have.

-Brett


> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Python-Dev [mailto:python-dev-bounces+tritium-
> > list=sdamon.com at python.org] On Behalf Of Christian Heimes
> > Sent: Saturday, January 13, 2018 12:06 PM
> > To: python-dev at python.org
> > Subject: [Python-Dev] Deprecate PEP 370 Per user site-packages directory?
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > PEP 370 [1] was my first PEP that got accepted. I created it exactly one
> > decade and two days ago for Python 2.6 and 3.0. Back then we didn't have
> > virtual environment support in Python. Ian Bicking had just started to
> > create the virtualenv project a couple of months earlier.
> >
> > Fast forward 10 years...
> >
> > Nowadays Python has venv in the standard library. The user-specific
> > site-packages directory is no longer that useful. I would even say it's
> > causing more trouble than it's worth. For example it's common for system
> > script to use "#!/usr/bin/python3" shebang without -s or -I option.
> >
> > I propose to deprecate the feature and remove it in Python 4.0.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Christian
> >
> > [1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0370/
> >
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