On Sat, Jun 25, 2016 at 9:44 PM, Nick Coghlan <[email protected]> wrote: > On 25 June 2016 at 15:40, Nathaniel Smith <[email protected]> wrote: [...] >> - they didn't know 'foo' was installed, so they expected 'pip install >> foo' to install it from scratch, and leave them with the latest >> version. >> >> - they knew 'foo' was installed, and they (mistakenly or not) believed >> that 'pip install' acts like 'apt-get install' and this is the way to >> upgrade to the latest version. (Maybe they believe this because they >> are Ubuntu users, maybe because 'pip install' is the only command they >> know and they are making a guess, whatever), > > No, it's an idempotent assertion about the system state: "Make sure X > is available, installing it if necessary". > > Maybe Debian folks are used to system packages stripping out the pip > metadata, so pip has no idea what's installed, even if the system > site-packages is configured to be visible in the venv? > > Python is not Linux, and it definitely isn't just Debian, so "apt does > it that way" is not a good argument for changing behaviout that isn't > broken.
Okay, I know how to put this more succinctly :-). I think I remember you saying at PyCon how we need to move to a model where our defaults are optimized for non-experts, with the expert stuff available but non-default? My argument isn't "Debian does it this way so we should do", my argument is "if you know what 'idempotent' means then you're an expert". -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
