[Distutils] The future of invoking pip

[Donald Stufft]

On November 7, 2015 at 7:12:59 PM, Antoine Pitrou (solipsis at pitrou.net) wrote:
> On Sat, 7 Nov 2015 23:41:25 +0000
> Paul Moore wrote:
> > On 7 November 2015 at 22:21, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> > > The actual question is: which problem are you trying to solve *that
> > > current users are actually experiencing*?
> >
> > Typically, people using "pip" to install stuff, and finding it gets
> > installed into the "wrong" Python installation (i.e., not the one they
> > expected). I'm not clear myself on how this happens, but it seems to
> > be common on some Linux distros (and I think on OSX as well) where
> > system and user-installed Pythons get confused.
>  
> Well, the problem is that "python -m pip" isn't any better. If you
> don't know what the current "pip" is, then chances are you don't know
> what the current "python" is, either.
>  
> (I'm not trying to deny the issue, I sometimes wonder what "pip" will
> install into exactly, but removing the command in favour of a "-m"
> switch wouldn't do any any good IMO, and it would make Python package
> management "even more baroque" than it currently is)
>  

The largest problem comes when ``python`` and ``pip`` disagree about which Python is being invoked. A further problem is that we also need a way beyond just X.Y to differentiate what version of Python something is being installed into. What should the command be to install into PyPy 2.4.0? What about PyPy3 2.4.0? What if someone has /usr/bin/python2.7 and /usr/bin/pip2.7 and they then install another Python 2.7 into /usr/local/bin/python2.7 but they don’t have pip installed there?

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