Instead, I'm starting to think that with the right error message,
"Explicit is better than implicit" and "In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess" should rule the day here.
For example:
$pip3 install Django pip is not currently installed. Run 'pip3 bootstrap' or 'pip3 bootstrap --system' to install it. $pip3 bootstrap --help Usage: pip3 bootstrap pip3 bootstrap --system
sounds reasonable to me.
Linux distros could then patch the 'pip3 bootstrap --system' variant to invoke the appropriate platform specific installation command.
well, e.g. debian patches distutils.command.install with it's /usr/local layer and dist-packages patches. I imagine, those kind of patches would also occur in distlib as well now? (which will be handling the bootstrap installs) Marcus