[Distutils] providing a way for pip to communicate extra info to users

[Pradyun Gedam]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2018, 05:17 Chris Jerdonek, <chris.jerdonek at gmail.com> wrote:

> On the pypa-dev Google group, a suggestion was raised about giving pip
> a way to communicate extra info to users.
>
> This was during a thread started by Matthew Brett about pip breaking
> for certain macOS users due to certain TLS changes ("Impending silent
> breakage of pip / macOS likely to cause severe confusion"). Donald
> said this behavior is governed by PEP 503 and that the topic was best
> discussed on distutils-sig:
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pypa-dev/Oz6SGA7gefo/RRXQBQSBBAAJ
> so I'm raising the suggestion here to continue the discussion.
>
> One of Donald's comments in response to the idea (and that occurred to
> me too and that I agree with) is that providing a way to communicate
> messages to users introduces another possible avenue for attack.
>
> A possible middle-ground could be to hard-code a message in pip. Pip
> could display the message in certain circumstances, e.g. in response
> to certain types of failures. For example, the message could tell
> users to check a certain URL maintained by PyPA for further
> information / possible announcements.
>
> What do people think?
>

I like the idea.

I think linking to a location where we can make informative comments would
be a good idea — ideally where we can show announcements reverse
chronologically.

I don’t know how relevant they are but scenarios where this would help,
that come to my mind are:

- Status Page: "pypi.org is undergoing an incident and installations may
fail. You can find more information at status.python.org."
- Major Features: for things like PEP 517 when it's released. "There's
news. Have a look at pypi.org/news" or something like that.


> --


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