[Distutils] PEX at Twitter (re: PEX - Twitter's multi-platform executable archive format for Python)

[Paul Moore]

On 1 February 2014 09:29, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> However, it's substantially *harder* to explain to people how
>> to use it correctly that way.
>
> But distil installs into venvs (both PEP 405 and virtualenv)
> without needing to be in there. It's as simple as
>
> distil -e path/to/venv install XYZ

I would like it if pip worked the same way (even though the tide of
installing pip into each virtualenv may be unstoppable by now). Would
you be interested in writing a patch to do this? I don't have the time
to commit to it and nobody else seems particularly interested in doing
it, which is one reason it's not happened, I suspect. It's certainly
not a fundamental limitation of pip.

If you'd rather have this as a selling point for distil, then that's
fair. But the vast weight of existing pip users and documentation,
plus the core support for pip as the preferred default installer
encapsulated in PEP 453, is going to make this much less useful to
people in practice.

Paul.