[Python-Dev] Deprecate PEP 370 Per user site-packages directory?

[Christian Heimes]

On 2018-01-13 20:08, Oleg Broytman wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> On Sat, Jan 13, 2018 at 06:06:16PM +0100, Christian Heimes <christian at python.org> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> PEP 370 [1] was my first PEP that got accepted. I created it exactly one
>> decade and two days ago for Python 2.6 and 3.0. Back then we didn't have
>> virtual environment support in Python. Ian Bicking had just started to
>> create the virtualenv project a couple of months earlier.
>>
>> Fast forward 10 years...
>>
>> Nowadays Python has venv in the standard library. The user-specific
>> site-packages directory is no longer that useful.
> 
>    Can I disagree?
> 
>> I would even say it's
>> causing more trouble than it's worth. For example it's common for system
>> script to use "#!/usr/bin/python3" shebang without -s or -I option.
> 
>    System scripts are run under user root which seldom has user-specific
> site-packages so why worry?

You'd be surprised how many tools and programs are using Python these
days. You can easily break important user programs by installing a
package with --user.

Christian