[Catalog-sig] Use user-specific site-packages by default?

[Yuval Greenfield]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 3:36 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Something that caught my attention in the recent security discussions
> is the observation that one of the most common insecure practices in
> the Python community is to run "sudo pip" with unsigned packages
> (sometimes on untrusted networks).
>
> To my mind, this is a natural reaction to the user experience of pip:
> you run "pip install package", it complains it can't write to the
> system site packages directory, so you run "sudo pip install package"
> to give it the permissions it clearly wants.
>
> If pip used the user site packages by default (when running as anyone
> other than root), that dangerous UI flow wouldn't happen. Even when
> pip was run outside a virtualenv, it would "just work" from the users
> perspective. It also has the advantage of keeping systems cleaner by
> default, since there will be a clear separation between system
> packages and pip-installed packages.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>
Excellent idea.

I've been using "sudo pip install" since forever for the exact reason you
mention. I don't even know how to install anything with pip and no sudo.

Yuval
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