[Distutils] Announcement: Pip 10 is coming, and will move all internal APIs

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Sun, Oct 22, 2017 at 8:52 AM, Elvis Stansvik
<elvis.stansvik at orexplore.com> wrote:
> 2017-10-21 14:34 GMT+02:00 Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com>:
>> On 21 October 2017 at 12:15, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> (Note: this is entirely speculative, and I have no idea how hard it would
>>> be, so please read it as the question it's intended to be)
>>
>> No problem - I don't know myself how hard some of this would be, either ;-)
>>
>>> Do you know if there any key APIs (like installation) that could be turned
>>> into wrappers around pip CLI calls in order to mitigate some of the impact?
>>
>> The obvious one is pip.main(). That's the one a lot of people use, but
>> it's easily replaceable by a simple subprocess call. That's actually
>> one of the reasons this was so frustrating to us - the bug reports we
>> got were often from people doing things they didn't need to, that they
>> could handle trivially via a supported approach.
>>
>> Otherwise, no. We've had little or no feedback on the tracker from
>> people using more complex internals, so our working assumption has
>> been there's very little that can't be handled via the CLI or existing
>> packages. Feedback so far from this mail hints that maybe we were
>> wrong, but it's still hard to know if it's one or two key projects, or
>> a whole range of people that we've yet to hear from. I'm pretty sure,
>> for example, that pipenv uses internals, either directly or via one of
>> their dependencies, but we've not seen any feedback from them yet.
>
> Another one that immediately comes to mind is pip-tools [1], which I
> think is quite widely used.
>
> But I just checked, and they filed a "check out how to deal with pip
> 10" issue two days ago [2] (I'm guessing in response to this thread).

Now pip 10 is out, of course, I discover that I've lost the
implementation of `get_supported` in pip.pep425tags.  It's my fault
for not remembering I had used it.

Is the suggestion to use the `_internal` import, or carry a copy of
the pep425tags code myself, that I have to keep up to date with the
internal pip copy?  That would also involve me copying the `glibc`
part of the code.  I see that the `wheel` package has an old copy of
that code too, which doesn't deal with manylinux wheels.    You
probably saw that `pip-tools` ended up vendoring the whole of pip9
[1].

Cheers,

Matthew

[1] https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools/tree/master/piptools/_vendored/pip