[Distutils] Q about best practices now (or near future)

[Vinay Sajip]

Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:

> No, my reservations are about delaying the installation of pip to first use 
(or any time after the installation of Python). I don't care that much about 
the distinction between bundling and install-time bootstrapping and would 
appreciate a PEP that explicitly weighed up the pros and cons of those two 
approaches (at the very least bundling means you don't need a reliable network 
connection at install time, while install time bootstrapping avoids the 
problem of old versions of pip, and also gives a way to bootstrap older Python 
installations).

Leaving aside specialised corporate setups with no access to PyPI, any 
installer is of very limited use without a reliable network connection. Most 
of the people we're expecting to reach with these changes will have always on 
network connections, or as near as makes no difference. However, pip and 
setuptools will change over time, and "-m getpip" allows upgrades to be done 
fairly easily, under user control.  So ISTM we're really talking about an 
initial "python -m getpip" before lots and lots of "pip install this", "pip 
install that" etc.

Did you (or anyone else) look at my getpip.py? In what way might it not be fit 
for purpose as a bootrstapper? If it can be readily modified to do what's 
needed (and I'll put in the work if I can), then given that bootstrapping was 
the original impetus lacking only an implementation which passed the "simple 
enough to explain, so a good idea" criterion, perhaps that situation can be 
rectified.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip