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

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 16 September 2013 12:27, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 16 Sep 2013 19:55, "Oscar Benjamin" <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I still don't understand why this is preferable to just shipping a
>> recent stable pip/setuptools and providing instructions to update
>> post-install. That would surely be a lot simpler not just to implement
>> but for others to understand.
>>
>> If I'm happy to use the bundled version of pip then why do I need to
>> do anything to make it usable after having already run the installer?
>> If I want the new version then why is 'py -m getpip' better than 'py
>> -m pip install -U pip'?
>
> You don't, the installer bootstraps it for you. Running it explicitly should
> only be needed when building from source, or bootstrapping a previously
> pip-free virtual environment.

Oh okay. So basically the normal thing is that pip just gets installed
automatically when you install Python. For most people the whole of
the "explicit bootstrapping" described in the PEP is an implementation
detail that occurs *implicitly* during installation? The only point of
relevance from a user perspective is that running the installer
without a network connection leaves you with an older version of
pip/setuptools.

> The complicated bootstrapping dance is both to make pip easy to leave out if
> people really don't want it and to avoid the CPython platform installers and
> pip getting into a fight about who is responsible for the files.

Surely this is only relevant for people using the installers since if
you're capable of building CPython from source then you should be
plenty capable of installing pip/setuptools from source as well.
Likewise if you're installing via a distro package manager then you're
not going to use this bootstrapping script. If this is just for the
Windows and OSX installers then can they not just have a tickbox for
installing the bundled pip and another tickbox for updating it (both
on by default)? If you need to update it after installation then you
can just use pip to update itself.

Who, apart from the Windows and OSX installers, is going to use this
bootstrap script?

When you say that pip and the installer could get into a fight about
responsibility do you mean for uninstallation? Presumably if you're
uninstalling Python then you also want to uninstall the associated pip
installation so it's fine for the installer to just delete everything
to do with pip anyway right?


Oscar