[Distutils] PEP 453 Round 2 - Explicit bootstrapping of pip in Python installations

[Donald Stufft]

On Sep 15, 2013, at 3:56 PM, Alex Burke <alexjeffburke at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sunday, 15 September 2013, Donald Stufft wrote:
> So there've been a number of updates to PEP453, so i'm posting it here again for more discussion:
> 
> Viewable online at: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0453/
> 
> <snip PEP text>
> 
> Hey,
> 
> I've been trying hard to follow the discussions but please forgive this question if its has been hashed out already.
> 
> I was a little concerned, despite it being an implementation detail, about bundling a pip which ends up being present somewhere whwerever the bootstrap is.
> 
> I know the concept of a mini-pip has been abandoned, but I couldn't help thinking about the pip / setuptools as wheels in Nick's roadmap summary. Instead of a copy of pip, could there not be minimal code to simply fetch the wheel and install that or perhaps even use it directly (a la what was possible with eggs)?
> 
> Perhaps that is already too much code and there are good reasons not to do this, but hoped asking would make it clear.
> 
> Thanks, Alex J Burke.

Basically three reasons:
    - There's a lot of code to handle a variety of situations in pip, it would
       be much harder to extract this code and keep it up to date in a way
       that the "mini pip" could use it. It would also not be as battle worn as
       the pip code.
    - On top of the one time cost there is the ongoing cost. As the packaging
       ecosystem progresses the stdlib implementation will need to be kept
       up to date as well as the pip code.
    - We need to include a copy of pip in order to support offline installs either
       way. Since we have the private copy there to support offline we might as
       well use it to handle everything.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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