[Python-Dev] Deprecate PEP 370 Per user site-packages directory? (original) (raw)

Random832 random832 at fastmail.com
Sat Jan 13 13:04:47 EST 2018

On Sat, Jan 13, 2018, at 12:06, Christian Heimes wrote:

Hi,

PEP 370 [1] was my first PEP that got accepted. I created it exactly one decade and two days ago for Python 2.6 and 3.0. Back then we didn't have virtual environment support in Python. Ian Bicking had just started to create the virtualenv project a couple of months earlier. Fast forward 10 years... Nowadays Python has venv in the standard library. The user-specific site-packages directory is no longer that useful. I would even say it's causing more trouble than it's worth. For example it's common for system script to use "#!/usr/bin/python3" shebang without -s or -I option. I propose to deprecate the feature and remove it in Python 4.0.

Where would pip install --user put packages, and how would one run scripts that require those packages? Right now these things Just Work; I've never had to learn how to use virtual environments.

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