[Distutils] PEP 453 quirk: pyvenv --no-download with an upgraded system pip

[Donald Stufft]

On Sep 18, 2013, at 10:26 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> In creating the next draft of PEP 453, I noticed an odd quirk of the
> proposed "pyvenv --no-download" option: it bootstraps the version of
> pip *that was provided with Python*, rather than the version currently
> installed in the base Python installation.
> 
> That seems incredibly strange to me, and I expect it will confuse
> users as well. "I'm using Python 3.4 and have upgraded pip to 1.6, but
> my virtual environments are only getting pip 1.5 when I use the
> '--no-download' option. HALP!".
> 
> Rather than doing any complicated trickery to make it make sense, I'm
> considering two comparatively simple changes:
> 
> 1. Change the proposed "--no-download" option for getpip and pyvenv to
> "--internal-only"

I think this one makes the most sense, although --bundled or something
sounds better than --internal-only.

> 
> 2. Change the getpip API to pass all other options through to pip
> install, rather than only defining a supported subset
> 
> That way the behaviour with the flag set makes slightly more intuitive
> sense (since that flag will be documented specifically as forcing
> installation from the getpip module's internal copy of pip)
> 
> If users want to use the more advanced features of pip when
> bootstrapping their virtual environments (like installing from a
> prebuilt wheel rather than the stdlib internal copy or from PyPI),
> then the recommended approach will be to use the ``--without-pip``
> option to ``pyvenv`` itself, and then run ``getpip`` directly after
> activating the virtual environment.
> 
> Cheers,
> Nick.
> 
> -- 
> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig


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

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