On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 10:21 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
.. the most robust option is to instead let a dedicated client tool like pip handle the problem:
* pip install: retrieve *and* install a component * pip download: just retrieve the files without installing them locally
This is a sound advise in general, but the specific issue here is how to bootstrap virtualenv for python 2.7 on the systems with missing/broken pip? Note that "ensurepip" may not be an option for a user without root privileges. The bootstrap options offered at <https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/stable/installation/> don't work. There is an open issue about this on Github: <https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/1042>. A comment on that issues suggests "curl https://pypi.python.org/simple/virtualenv-15.0.1.tar.gz", but that does not work either.