In article <55B209B3-9576-4CF0-B58C-2A1E692AFFF1@stufft.io>, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:
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.
Off the top of my head, including a copy of pip as a pre-installed global site-package seems like a very reasonable suggestion. For the python.org OS X installer, it should be no problem to implement. It would be equally easy to implement for future 2.7 and 3.3 maintenance releases.
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. If Linux packagers really don't want it installed by default they could simply just remove it and either install it along with Python, or continue to keep it how it is today as a separate package?
This sounds an unnecessary complication. I suspect that there is a small minority of users who actually build Python from source. And they should know what they are doing. I believe most users either use a distribution-provided Python (via their OS) or a third-party package provider (including python.org binary installers and their derivatives). The OS distributors are going to do what they currently do; the only change needed is to persuade them to include their pip package as a mandatory dependency. Trying to hack the Python source build process to include a copy of pip is just not worth the effort. -- Ned Deily, nad@acm.org