[Python-ideas] Things I wish Pip learned from Npm

[Donald Stufft]

On May 8, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Philipp A. <flying-sheep at web.de> wrote:

> 2014-05-07 22:48 GMT+02:00 M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com>:
> 
> 
> 
> Please note that you should probably post this to the pip mailing
> list and/or the distutils list.
> 
> python-ideas is about ideas for Python itself and even though Python 3.4
> includes bootstrap code to install pip, pip itself is not developed by
> the Python Core Devs.
> 
> 
> There’s one point that’s relevant and worth discussing here, I quote:
> 
> 
> 
> pip’s choice of defaulting to a global installation is wrong
> 
> 
> Yes. Python’s pip bootstrapping is there in order to guarantee that all the “ just type pip install foobar” tutorials work.
> 
> Linux distributions like Arch, Debian and Ubuntu deliberately broke this guarantee, and for good reasons:
> 
> Pip per default installs globally, which should be the system package manager’s territory.
> 
> 

This isn’t exactly accurate. Linux distributions aren’t installing pip globally using ensurepip, which is an entirely different thing than pip. We never expected Linux distros *to* use ensurepip for that purpose. If you install python-pip on any of these distros you still get a version of pip that installs things globally. Some distros (Fedora I believe) are making Python depend on pip so the outcome is exactly the same.
> It would be best if pip would work like this if you run it without some -g, --global switch outside a venv:
> 
> 

I don’t think pip will ever require a virtual environment by default. However there is an open ticket to make —user installs the default when running as non root.
> On Linux: “You’re on linux, please use your package manager for global installation or use a virtual environment. Use the -g switch to force global installation”
> 
> On Windows and OSX: “Please use the -g switch for installations outside of virtual environments”
> 
> Is it to late to change this? I really want the guarantee and pip to work. But I also totally understand why all those distributions break it!
> 
> 

Like I said above, no distribution currently breaks pip, a few have a broken ensurepip but that is being fixed.

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-----------------
Donald Stufft
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