[Python-Dev] PEP 394: Allow the python command to not be installed (and other minor edits) (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Sat Apr 28 05:34:42 EDT 2018

On 28 April 2018 at 05:08, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

On 28 April 2018 at 12:34, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

Um, the PEP has "Unix-Like Systems" in its heading, so discussing the Windows situation seems out of scope to me. Sorry, I conflated two issues there - while PEP 394 itself is specific to Unix-like systems, my thoughts on where I'd like to take it in the future are mainly informed by my experiences helping to maintain the Python Packaging User Guide these days, where the current platform dependence of "How does a user run Python, pip, and pip-installed Python tools from the command line?" is a frequent source of problems for folks just starting out. (We really don't want to be maintaining separate "Windows instructions" and "everywhere else instructions" indefinitely, but that's where we are currently)

Strong +1 on this. I am not a Unix user, so my opinions on PEP 394 are not relevant, but I agree with Nick that the current mess over "how to write general instructions for a newcomer on how to run Python or Python-related commands" is unsustainable. We have:

  1. In a virtualenv - python
  2. On windows - py (or "python" might work, if you're lucky, and it may or may not work the same as "py")
  3. On Unix - python3 (or if you have a self-installed Python, or something like pyenv, "python" maybe, who knows).
  4. If you're using something like Anaconda - quite likely "python", but I'm not honestly sure except on Windows

And it's even worse once you get to something like pip: "pip", "pip3", "python -m pip", "py -m pip", "python3 -m pip", ...

I don't want to push any particular solution here myself (my almost exclusively Windows experience is too biased for me to understand the trade-offs) but IMO, it's definitely something we need to solve.

Paul

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list