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

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sun Jan 14 09:39:08 EST 2018

On 14 January 2018 at 03:06, Christian Heimes <christian at python.org> 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.

Given that we're working towards making user site-packages the default install location in pip, removing that feature at the interpreter level would be rather counterproductive :)

Virtual environments are a useful tool if you're a professional developer, but for a lot of folks just doing ad hoc personal scripting, they're more complexity than is needed, and the simple "my packages" vs "the system's package" split is a better option. (It's also rather useful for bootstrapping tools like "pipsi" - "pip install --user pipsi", then "pipsi install" the other commands you want access to).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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