On Sat, 1/2/14, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
My point is that doing it the way virtualenv/pip did avoided a bunch of design work and associated testing, and reduced the opportunities for bugs - when you're trying to get things done with limited resources, that's a sensible engineering trade-off to make.
A "bunch of design work" makes it seem a lot more complicated than it really is. Your suggestion comes across like an ex post facto rationalisation of a decision which was perhaps more truly based on social concerns than technical ones. Note that I've developed distil as part of my volunteer activities - it doesn't pay any of my bills - and on my own. And you're telling me about how to get the best out of "limited resources"? :-)
That said (and this is a point that hadn't occurred to me earlier), it's also worth noting that not only does the bootstrapping approach work well enough in most cases, but it also solves the problem of being able to easily have a newer (or older!) pip in virtual environments than is provided by the distro package manager on Linux systems
Eh? The problem of having a newer or older pip in a venv only exists because pip needs to be in a venv ... so I don't see the relevance of this to our earlier discussion. Since distil doesn't occupy a space in venvs,. the concern of a system version being older or newer than that in a venv doesn't arise. Regards, Vinay Sajip