[Python-ideas] Looking for input to help with the pip situation

[Paul Moore]

On 7 November 2017 at 12:44, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> - make sure the system path is correctly set
>
> Recent python.org Windows installers do this automatically, but there
> are unfortunately still lots of ways for things to go wrong.

I believe the latest installers switch it off again, because one of
the ways things can go wrong is that stuff put at the start of the
user path is still lower priority than stuff in the system path, and
we now default to user installs. This is an actual problem with mixed
python.org and Anaconda installations, for example - Anaconda adds
itself to the system PATH, and overrides a default user install of
python.org Python. So you can't prioritise python.org over Anaconda
without manual path hacking. (This hit me when I installed Visual
Studio and selected "include Python (Anaconda)" - I can't recall the
exact option, but it broke my python.org install).

As you say command-line environments are just inherently user-hostile,
and we can't do a lot about that. People who buy into the command line
experience learn how to deal with the complexity. People who use IDEs
like Visual Studio or PyCharm can rely on the IDE vendor to provide a
clean experience. But people who want to use core Python but who
aren't comfortable fighting with the command line have a bit of a
problem. We can't solve that problem for them, the best we can do is
offer suggestions on best practices, or tools that help alleviate the
issues.

Paul