[Python-ideas] from __pip__ import

[אלעזר]

I believe that at least some of these problems can be addressed given that
pip *knows* that this import is an in-script import. So the list of corner
cases will be shorter.

Elazar

On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 1:35 PM Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 19 September 2016 at 23:46, אלעזר <elazarg at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> import pip
> >> pip.install('attrs')
> >> import attr
> >
> > Please forgive me for my ignorance, but it doesn't work as written -
> what's
> > the actual method?
>
> As David Mertz said, pip.main(['install', 'attrs']) works right now,
> but it is NOT a supported use of pip[1]. To be 100% explicit, the only
> supported way of doing this is
>
> import sys
> from subprocess import run
> run([sys.executable, '-m', 'pip', 'install', 'attrs'])
>
> I suggested a hypothetical "pip.install" method as there is currently
> some discussion on the pip tracker about providing a supported install
> method. But it doesn't exist yet. Sorry for being confusing.
>
> While on the whole subject of this, I should also point out that there
> are a lot of potential issues with installing new packages while a
> Python program is running. They are all low-probability, and easy to
> avoid if you're not doing weird things, but for a generally-promoted
> mechanism, we need to explain the corner cases[2], and an approach
> with a list of caveats longer than the main documentation is
> problematic.
>
> 1. If the install fails, you need to catch that and report it to the
> user, in a more friendly manner than pip's output. For example if the
> user has no C compiler and you need a C extension to be built.
> 2. You quite possibly want to suppress pip's output if it's *not* a
> failure, as it'll clutter up the program's real output.
> 3. If the code has already imported foo.bar, then you install a new
> version of foo (there are discussions as to whether pip install foo
> should automatically imply --upgrade, so even if it won't do that by
> default now, it might in the future), and maybe that new version
> doesn't have a bar submodule. So now you have a weird mix of old and
> new code in your process.
> 4. The install mechanism sometimes (I can't recall the details) caches
> the fact that it couldn't import a module. If it does that and then
> later you pip install that module, imports will still fail because the
> information is cached.
>
> I'm still not at all clear why any of this is so much better than a
> comment at the top of the script
>
> # To run this script, you need to "pip install attrs" first
>
> Paul.
>
> [1] We've had people report issues where pip breaks their logging
> config, for example, because pip uses logging but doesn't expect to be
> run from user code that also does so.
> [2] That "run([sys.executable, ...])" invocation doesn't work in an
> embedded program, for example, where sys.executable isn't "python".
>
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