On 7 November 2017 at 12:44, Nick Coghlan ncoghlan@gmail.com wrote:
- make sure the system path is correctly set
Recent python.org Windows installers do this automatically, but there are unfortunately still lots of ways for things to go wrong.
I believe the latest installers switch it off again, because one of the ways things can go wrong is that stuff put at the start of the user path is still lower priority than stuff in the system path, and we now default to user installs. This is an actual problem with mixed python.org and Anaconda installations, for example - Anaconda adds itself to the system PATH, and overrides a default user install of python.org Python. So you can't prioritise python.org over Anaconda without manual path hacking. (This hit me when I installed Visual Studio and selected "include Python (Anaconda)" - I can't recall the exact option, but it broke my python.org install).
As you say command-line environments are just inherently user-hostile, and we can't do a lot about that. People who buy into the command line experience learn how to deal with the complexity. People who use IDEs like Visual Studio or PyCharm can rely on the IDE vendor to provide a clean experience. But people who want to use core Python but who aren't comfortable fighting with the command line have a bit of a problem. We can't solve that problem for them, the best we can do is offer suggestions on best practices, or tools that help alleviate the issues.
Paul