[Python-Dev] 3.5 release schedule PEP

[Paul Moore]

On 26 September 2014 01:38, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> Either way I'm fairly commited to making --user the default, the only
> question
> on my mind is what exactly does that look like (e.g. does root get --user by
> default?) and how we get from where we are now to that point. I think that
> raising an error here is fairly unfriendly when we can know with pretty good
> certainity what the user wanted (and they can explicitly declare that if
> they want too).

A couple of points come to mind (although they may be more suitable
for distutils-sig).

1. Do user installs "leak" into virtualenvs? If so, then in effect
--use-system-packages is switched back on again if --user installs
become the norm. Which is almost certainly not what is wanted.
2. pip install should default to not being --user when run from within
a virtualenv (same logic as the isolated Python case, but much more
important that behaviour remains as now, because the whole *point* of
virtualenvs is to isolate).

Note that both of these points apply both to venv and virtualenvs.

Paul