[Distutils] Module Installation Issues

[Paul Moore]

On 13 September 2016 at 23:55, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> Perhaps a better idea would be to add some smarts to the REPL (but not to Python itself) that would detect something like:
>
>>>> pip install
>
> And print a better error message that gives a better indication about what’s gone wrong besides a SyntaxError?

This is pretty easy to do:

def excepthook(typ, value, traceback):
    # Tidy this up to suit
    if typ is SyntaxError and value.text.startswith("pip"):
        print("You may want to run this from a shell prompt")
        return
    sys.__excepthook__(typ, value, traceback)

sys.excepthook = excepthook

Of course, it doesn't solve the problem of a user who doesn't know
what a "shell prompt" is...

Paul