[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
More information about the Distutils-SIG
mailing list