[Distutils] PyPi’s predictable download url

[Paul Moore]

On 27 July 2017 at 11:06, Alex Grönholm <alex.gronholm at nextday.fi> wrote:
>>> I didn't get the impression that this was the problem the OP was
>>> hitting, and it's certainly not what I'd recommend for him, but you
>>> should be able to just clone the virtualenv repo and run ```python
>>> virtualenv.py``` to get started.
>>
>>
>> A shallow clone would minimize the bandwidth cost:
>>
>> $ git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv
>>
> Doesn't work for projects using setuptools_scm, as they require the latest
> tag to get the version info.

None of this is a general solution.

The general solution (for the OP) is:

1. Assume your users have a working pip.
2. pip install myproject

The rest of the discussion is (as far as I can tell) how to avoid
having to deal with step (1). And in particular, how to avoid having
to deal with step (1) *if you're trying to install virtualenv*. None
of the solutions really make much sense in practice, as it's pretty
easy to get a working pip. Any recent version of Python comes with pip
installed, if your distro doesn't then you should install pip with
your system package manager, if you don't have admin privileges then
https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/ explains how to use
get-pip.py (you need --user if you don't have the privileges to modify
the Python installation you're using - that's maybe not as obvious as
it could be from the page, although it shouldn't be *too* hard to work
out if system installs are failing).

Without knowing why "pip install" isn't sufficient for the OP, other
than the fact that the original question was asking for a "predictable
URL" (which doesn't exist) rather than describing what the ultimate
objective was, it's hard to see what the point of this discussion is.

Paul