On Jul 13, 2013, at 1:31 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm currently leaning towards offering both, as we're going to need a tool for bootstrapping source builds, but the simplest way to bootstrap pip for Windows and Mac OS X users is to just *bundle a copy with the binary installers*. So long as the bundled copy looks *exactly* the way it would if installed later (so it can update itself), then we avoid the problem of coupling the pip update cycles to the standard library feature release cycle. The bundled version can be updated to the latest available versions when we do a Python maintenance release.

We could simply check it into the site-packages inside the CPython source tree could we not? *Not* providing a bootstrap script and merely checking it into the default site-packages means it's available for everyone. No matter how python installed.