[Distutils] Current status of PEP 439 (pip boostrapping)

Ned Deily nad at acm.org
Sat Jul 13 08:29:20 CEST 2013


In article <55B209B3-9576-4CF0-B58C-2A1E692AFFF1 at stufft.io>,
 Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> On Jul 13, 2013, at 1:31 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm currently leaning towards offering both, as we're going to need a tool 
> > for bootstrapping source builds, but the simplest way to bootstrap pip for 
> > Windows and Mac OS X users is to just *bundle a copy with the binary 
> > installers*. So long as the bundled copy looks *exactly* the way it would 
> > if installed later (so it can update itself), then we avoid the problem of 
> > coupling the pip update cycles to the standard library feature release 
> > cycle. The bundled version can be updated to the latest available versions 
> > when we do a Python maintenance release.

Off the top of my head, including a copy of pip as a pre-installed 
global site-package seems like a very reasonable suggestion.   For the 
python.org OS X installer, it should be no problem to implement.  It 
would be equally easy to implement for future 2.7 and 3.3 maintenance 
releases.
 
> We could simply check it into the site-packages inside the CPython source 
> tree could we not? *Not* providing a bootstrap script and merely checking it 
> into the default site-packages means it's available for everyone. No matter 
> how python installed. If Linux packagers really don't want it installed by 
> default they could simply just remove it and either install it along with 
> Python, or continue to keep it how it is today as a separate package?

This sounds an unnecessary complication.  I suspect that there is a 
small minority of users who actually build Python from source.  And they 
should know what they are doing.  I believe most users either use a 
distribution-provided Python (via their OS) or a third-party package 
provider (including python.org binary installers and their derivatives).  
The OS distributors are going to do what they currently do; the only 
change needed is to persuade them to include their pip package as a 
mandatory dependency.  Trying to hack the Python source build process to 
include a copy of pip is just not worth the effort.

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org



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