On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 8:59 AM, Brendan Barnwell brenbarn@brenbarn.net wrote:
On 2017-11-12 05:18, Nick Coghlan wrote:
- the `pip install` option really is nicer looking than `python -m pip
install`, and it only has actual problems in the presence of multiple Python versions and when upgrading pip itself on Windows (plus: lots of third party guides recommend it, as do pypi.org project pages)
Is there any *advantage* to using `pip install` instead of `python-m install`? If not, could we at least change everything under Python/pip control (e.g., pip documentation) to never recommend `pip` and always recommend `python -m pip` instead, and encourage all third-party documentation to always use `python -m pip` and never use `pip`? Obviously this isn't a full solution, but in the end there's no way we change external third-party documentation, which will always eventually become outdated. Absent that, it seems worthwhile to regularize existing official documentation.
Can we instead make it so that 'pip' and 'python -m pip' *are* actually equivalent? I know there are all kinds of pathological things that can happen, but it seems like we can drive the frequency of this error down more.
What if instead of installing a standard entry point, the pip executable was installed as
#!/bin/sh exec python -m pip "$@"
on Unix-likes, and a pip.bat with the equivalent contents on Windows? (Bonus: maybe this would fix the problem with upgrading pip on Windows?)
-n