[Distutils] The future of invoking pip

[Paul Moore]

On 6 November 2015 at 12:10, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> Doesn’t py.exe just look at some ini files and environment variables to decide what to invoke? I’m not sure why we couldn’t just replicate that behavior. Is there something that py.exe does that we can’t also do in Python?

What's there might be possible in Python, but there are some nasty
special cases. The launcher code looks in the registry, and in order
to support running both 32 and 64 bit Pythons from the same launcher
exe, it needs to play tricks to see both the 32 and 64 bit registry
values, and I'm not sure the APIs to do that are exposed to Python so
it may need ctypes.

Doable certainly, easy not so sure. We could of course do a simplified
version and not try to be precisely equivalent to the launcher
behaviour - but that may also cause user confusion. The simplest cases
are easy, it's the corner cases that get nasty.

Paul