[Distutils] Module Installation Issues

[Leonardo Rochael Almeida]

On 13 September 2016 at 19:00, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> [...]
>
> I'm not honestly sure how big the "installing while a process is
> running" issue would be - I did a few simple experiments and couldn't
> immediately trigger weirdness, but I believe it can happen. And things
> get significantly worse if we allow upgrades from the Python prompt
> rather than just installs (e.g., if you have already imported
> something from the old version and then upgrade).
>

The only weirdness on install I can imagine would happen is if the
installation creates `.pth` files, as those wouldn't be re-read by the
currently running Python.

The only package I remember having these was PIL, which can't be installed
by pip anyway. Pillow, the PIL fork, doesn't use .pth files.

(easy_install creates and manages .pth files, but if you're using
setuptools APIs to install packages from inside a running process then 1.
you already have a system to automatically make the packages available in
your namespace and 2. you know, or should know, what you're getting into).

Overall, it'd probably be a nice thing to have, but it's nowhere near
> as simple as it seems at first glance.
> Paul


Considering that installing a package and importing a package are two very
different things, I don't see why we couldn't handle the simple case of
installing the package for the first time with a nice API. Just document
the usual caveat emptors.

Cheers,

Leo
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