On 25 September 2014 16:43, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:
Basically people have Python in a ton of different configurations and it’s hard to figure out if —user will work out of the box in all of them or not.
I guess that "Using the python.org Python installer on Windows" is a limited enough subset that we probably could check that --user worked in that situation. The problem is, how do we implement it? A special case so that pip defaults to --user sometimes, but not others? (I'm strongly against that) Leave the default as not --user and document that Windows users with Python in "Program Files" should always specify --user? (I'm against that because it makes the documentation highly confusing, and we've just done a lot of work to simplify it). Basically, I'd like to hold off moving to "Program Files" as a default until *after* we have enough confidence in user installs that we are willing to switch pip to --user as the default behaviour everywhere. And yes, I'm aware that the first "we" in that was "python-dev" and the second was "PyPA". And that expecting python-dev to wait for PyPA to approve the change may well be unacceptable. Paul