[Distutils] PyPi’s predictable download url

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 10:21 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> .. the most robust option is to instead let a dedicated client tool like pip
> handle the problem:
>
> * pip install: retrieve *and* install a component
> * pip download: just retrieve the files without installing them locally

This is a sound advise in general, but the specific issue here is how
to bootstrap virtualenv for python 2.7 on the systems with
missing/broken pip?  Note that "ensurepip" may not be an option for a
user without root privileges.

The bootstrap options offered at
<https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/stable/installation/> don't work.
There is an open issue about this on Github:
<https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/1042>.  A comment on that
issues suggests "curl
https://pypi.python.org/simple/virtualenv-15.0.1.tar.gz", but that
does not work either.