On Jul 17, 2013, at 8:03 PM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

Leaving aside specialised corporate setups with no access to PyPI, any
installer is of very limited use without a reliable network connection. Most
of the people we're expecting to reach with these changes will have always on
network connections, or as near as makes no difference. However, pip and
setuptools will change over time, and "-m getpip" allows upgrades to be done
fairly easily, under user control. So ISTM we're really talking about an
initial "python -m getpip" before lots and lots of "pip install this", "pip
install that" etc.

It's hardly true that this is only specialized corporate setups. Another situation

off the top of my head would be at various meet ups or conferences where

people are trying to teach new people and might have little or no access.

Even assuming they *do* have access to the network, accessing the network

includes a number of extra failure conditions. For instance pip 1.3+ is the

first version of pip to include verification of SSL and we've had a fair number

of people need help making pip be able to reach PyPI through their particular

setups. Sometimes it's because the version of OpenSSL is old, other times

they don't have OpenSSL at all, or they have a proxy between them and

PyPI which is preventing them or requires additional configuration to make it

work.

Each possible failure condition is another thing that can go wrong for users,

each one is another point of frustration and another reason not to fetch

it if it can be helped.

You state that an installer is of limited use without a network connection but

that's not particularly true either. Especially with Wheels and the removal of

the simple "setup.py install" and the current focus on having a local cache

of pre-built wheels I suspect there to be a decent number of people wanting

to install from local wheels.

It is true that each problem has a solution, but they are different solutions for

each problem and generally require that the person be aware of the problem

and the solution prior to having it in order to work around it.

Did you (or anyone else) look at my getpip.py? In what way might it not be fit
for purpose as a bootrstapper? If it can be readily modified to do what's
needed (and I'll put in the work if I can), then given that bootstrapping was
the original impetus lacking only an implementation which passed the "simple
enough to explain, so a good idea" criterion, perhaps that situation can be
rectified.