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On Sep 25, 2014, at 11:54 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

On 25 September 2014 16:43, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:

Basically people have Python in a ton of different configurations and it’s
hard to figure out if —user will work out of the box in all of them or not.

I guess that "Using the python.org Python installer on Windows" is a
limited enough subset that we probably could check that --user worked
in that situation.

The problem is, how do we implement it? A special case so that pip
defaults to --user sometimes, but not others? (I'm strongly against
that) Leave the default as not --user and document that Windows users
with Python in "Program Files" should always specify --user? (I'm
against that because it makes the documentation highly confusing, and
we've just done a lot of work to simplify it).

Basically, I'd like to hold off moving to "Program Files" as a default
until \*after\* we have enough confidence in user installs that we are
willing to switch pip to --user as the default behaviour everywhere.
And yes, I'm aware that the first "we" in that was "python-dev" and
the second was "PyPA". And that expecting python-dev to wait for PyPA
to approve the change may well be unacceptable.

Paul