[Python-Dev] PEP 453 (pip bootstrapping) ready for pronouncement? (original) (raw)

Daniel Holth dholth at gmail.com
Fri Sep 27 19:25:40 CEST 2013

On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 12:15 PM, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:

On Fri, 27 Sep 2013 15:26:41 +0100, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

On 27 September 2013 15:08, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote: >> New users on Windows and Mac OS X. I've heard many more complaints > > from folks running tutorials about the pip bootstrapping process than > > I ever have from the community at large about the GIL :P > > I bet those users are not running third-party distros, but rather > are sitting in front of pretty close to plain vanilla factory installs > of the OS, no? And "new users" on Mac OS X already have "old installs" > of Python, no?

Windows users who don't use a third-party distro like Enthought, generally download the python.org installer. At the moment, that doesn't give them a "pip" command. So if they want to install any third party package, they have to start by installing pip. The instructions for that are reasonably clear, but non-trivial, largely because tools like curl are not commonly available on Windows, and by default running a Python script may not do what you expect. Rather than try to fix these problems (which are hard) the intent is to have the pip command installed by the python.org installer. [...] I can't speak for Linux distros or OSX users, but for Windows I do believe that this is a significant improvement, and worth the (IMO, negligible) risk involved in adding this to a maintenance release. I'm not an OS X user, and probably most people on this list use macports or something similar, which essentially puts them in the same boat as the linux users...and there's a section in the PEP about that (that's where the message about installing pip if you run pip and the distro didn't include it with python is supposed to come from). For OS X users not using something like macports, I'm pretty sure they are going to be in a similar boat to the Windows users, with just a touch of added confusion coming from the fact that an older version of Python is already installed. But the instructions they will find on the web for installing package X (once this change hits the field) will be to install the newest version of 2.7 (or 3) using the python.org installer, and then they will have the pip command and can go from there. --David

OS X and Linux change Python in ways that can be confusing to new and experienced users, like not installing the stdlib source code by default, or not installing the profiler, or simply by being out of date. On these platforms attempting to use the system Python for development can be a costly mistake instead of a convenience.

Users get a more consistent experience by starting with the installers from python.org. Hopefully the tutorials will reflect the consistency added by this PEP.

This PEP only gets pip, an operation which is a recurring inconvenience for me even though I use Linux. It does not solve any of the problems you may have after pip has been installed.

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