[Distutils] PEP 439 and pip bootstrap updated

[Paul Moore]

On 10 July 2013 21:30, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On 11 Jul 2013 04:56, "Brett Cannon" <brett at python.org> wrote:
> >
> > Didn't know Windows was never updated to use a versioned binary. That's
> rather unfortunate.
>
> Hence the PyLauncher project.
>
> Paul's right, though - the PEP is currently very *nix-centric. For
> Windows, we likely need to consider something based on "py -m pip", which
> then raises the question of whether or not that's what we should be
> supporting on *nix as well (with pip and pip3 as convenient shorthand).
>
> There's also the fact that the Python launcher is *already* available as a
> separate Windows installer for earlier releases. Perhaps we should just be
> bundling the bootstrap script with that for earlier Windows releases.
>

Thanks Nick. I was part way through a much more laboured email basically
saying the same thing :-)

For reference, PEP 394 is the versioned binary PEP. It is explicitly Unix
only and defers Windows to PEP 397 (pylauncher) as being "too complex" to
cover alongside the Unix proposal :-)

I think "python -m pip" should be the canonical form (used in
documentation, examples, etc). The unittest module has taken this route, as
has timeit. Traditionally, python-dev have been lukewarm about the -m
interface, but its key advantage is that it bypasses all the issues around
versioned executables, cross-platform issues, the general dreadfulness of
script wrappers on Windows, etc, in one fell swoop.

Paul.
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