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

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Wed, 17 Feb 2016 05:12:48 -0500
"Eric V. Smith" <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:

> 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.

I think it would be reasonable to let vendors do so by placing a
specific file into the "site-packages" (or perhaps even a pip config
file if we want to put more information in it).  Then upstream Python
doesn't need to have a say in it.

Regards

Antoine.