[Distutils] [final version?] PEP 513 - A Platform Tag for Portable Linux Built Distributions

[Eric V. Smith]

On 2/17/2016 3:55 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 16:10:34 -0800
> Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
>>
>> I am 100% on board with telling people "don't use `sudo pip install´".  Frankly I have been telling the pip developers to just break this for years (see https://pip2014.com, which, much to my chagrin, still exists); `sudo pip install´ should just exit immediately with an error; to the extent that packagers need it, the only invocation that should work should be `sudo pip install --i-am-building-an-operating-system´.
> 
> This is frankly ridiculous. The problem is not the use of "sudo" or the
> invocation under root, it's to install into a system Python. So the
> solution should be to flag the system Python as not suitable for using
> pip into, not to forbid using pip under root.

I agree that there are uses for running pip as root (I do so myself).
It's installing into the system Python that needs to be strongly
discouraged, if not outright prevented. I'm not sure we have a good way
of identifying the system Python, but that's another issue.

Eric.