[Python-Dev] Distutils and Distribute roadmap (and some words on Virtualenv, Pip) (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Thu Oct 8 13:43:24 CEST 2009

Hello,

Thanks for the summary :)

[Distribute 0.7]

- easyinstall is going to be deprecated ! use Pip !

Apparently there are a couple of things Pip doesn't support:

« It cannot install from eggs. It only installs from source. (Maybe this will be changed sometime, but it’s low priority.) » « It is incompatible with some packages that customize distutils or setuptools in their setup.py files. » « Maybe it doesn’t work on Windows. At least, the author doesn’t test on Windows often. »

(from http://pip.openplans.org/#differences-from-easy-install)

Virtualenv allows you to create an isolated environment to install some distribution without polluting the main site-packages, a bit like a user site-packages.

My opinion is that this tool exists only because Python doesn't support the installation of multiple versions for the same distributions.

virtualenv has the virtue of keeping your main installation clean and manageable. Besides, as someone said, it also allows you to create completely isolated environments if you want full control over your deployment (especially when you're not the sysadmin).

Regards

Antoine.

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