On 13 July 2013 06:31, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

* bundling a *full* copy of pip with the Python installers for Windows and Mac OS X, but installing it to site-packages rather than to the standard library directory. That way pip can be used to upgrade itself as normal, rather than making it part of the standard library per se. This is then closer to the "bundled application" model adopted for IDLE in PEP 434 (we could, in fact, move to distributing idle the same way).

How robust is the process of upgrading pip using itself? Specifically on Windows, where these things typically seem less reliable.

Personally, I have never upgraded pip using itself, because I only ever install pip in virtualenvs, which don't have a lifespan as long as a pip release cycle :-) It would be easy to imagine a new pip release resulting in a *lot* of bugs raised against Python (rather than pip) saying that the upgrade fails. And of course if an upgrade fails, we can't just release a new version of pip that fixes the issue, because it's the *old* version that is installed and has to do the upgrade. So there's manual fiddling to do. Not a good experience for Python users.

My current workflow is to have absolutely nothing installed in the system Python and use virtualenvs for everything. This is a bit extreme, but the issues I've hit in the past when package management has gone wrong have made me very cautious.

If the pip upgrade process is rock-solid, this isn't an issue, but I'm not sure that it is, myself.

Paul