[Distutils] Installing packages using pip

[R. David Murray]

On Fri, 13 Nov 2015 12:09:28 -0800, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Nov 13, 2015 12:00 PM, "Alexander Walters" <tritium-list at sdamon.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > import pip
> > pip.install(PACKAGESPEC)
> >
> > something like that?
> 
> This would be extremely handy if it could be made to work reliably... But
> I'm skeptical about whether it can be made to work reliably. Consider all
> the fun things that could happen once you start upgrading packages while
> python is running, and might e.g. have half of an upgraded package already
> loaded into memory. It's like the reloading problem but even more so.

If I remember correctly, this is something that R supports that I
thought was cool when I saw it.  We could have a command analogous
to the 'help' command, so you wouldn't even have to do an explicit
import.  But yeah, making it work may be hard.

--David