[Distutils] Installing packages using pip

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Nov 13, 2015 3:07 PM, "R. David Murray" <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Yeah, I've long used this in R and it really is awesome -- I wasn't kidding
in the first sentence I wrote above :-). It leads to a really short
frustration cycle:

>>> import somepkg
error
>>> install("somepkg")
installing...done.
>>> import somepkg
:-)

But details of R's execution model make this easier to do. Maybe it could
be supported for the special case of installing new packages with no
upgrades?

A good way to environment with the possibilities would be to write a %pip
magic for ipython:

http://ipython.readthedocs.org/en/stable/interactive/tutorial.html#magic-functions
http://ipython.readthedocs.org/en/stable/config/custommagics.html

-n
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