[Distutils] The future of invoking pip

[James Bennett]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 3:41 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:

> pip is a special case -- for MOST python command line tools, the user does
> not care which python it is running with -- if it works, it works.
>
> the failure case we are trying to address here is when "pip install" works
> sjtu fine -- it finds and installs the package into the python pip is
> associated with -- it just doesn't do what the user wants and expects!
>

I still feel like it's just kicking the problem down the line. Switching
from 'pip install' to 'python -m pip install' doesn't actually solve the
issue of how easy we've made it for people to create non-functional Python
installations (non-functional in the sense that they will mysteriously
"work but not really work"). All this switch does is hand the problem over
to the *next* tool the user happens to invoke. So "pip is special" doesn't
really work as a rebuttal, at least to me.

The real problem to solve is management of multi-Python installations; I
don't really know right now *how* to solve it, but slapping one band-aid
onto the problem by changing pip won't accomplish that and so will break a
lot of existing conventions and documentation for what seems like at best
very minor gains.
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