On 26 September 2014 01:38, Donald Stufft
Either way I'm fairly commited to making --user the default, the only question on my mind is what exactly does that look like (e.g. does root get --user by default?) and how we get from where we are now to that point. I think that raising an error here is fairly unfriendly when we can know with pretty good certainity what the user wanted (and they can explicitly declare that if they want too).
A couple of points come to mind (although they may be more suitable for distutils-sig). 1. Do user installs "leak" into virtualenvs? If so, then in effect --use-system-packages is switched back on again if --user installs become the norm. Which is almost certainly not what is wanted. 2. pip install should default to not being --user when run from within a virtualenv (same logic as the isolated Python case, but much more important that behaviour remains as now, because the whole *point* of virtualenvs is to isolate). Note that both of these points apply both to venv and virtualenvs. Paul