On 9 August 2017 at 23:15, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Tue, Aug 08, 2017 at 12:56:56PM +0200, Chris Warrick wrote: > >> While setuptools is not officially part of the stdlib, > > This is the critical factor. How can you use *by default* something that > is *NOT* supplied by default? > > Obviously you cannot. It is physically impossible.
The problem with setuptools (and pip) is that they are not first-party stdlib members, but they are not third-party packages either. They’re somewhere in between. They have been blessed by the core developers. And yes, setuptools might be in all the places you mentioned: > But this does NOT hold for everyone, possibly not even for the majority > of Python users. For example: > > - students using their school's computers; > > - corporate and government users using a SOE (Standard Operating > Environment); > > - people using a system where, for policy reasons, only the > standard library is permitted. * If those computers run Windows (as they often do) and run a recent Python version (3.4 or newer/2.7.9 or newer), setuptools will be installed, unless the IT people explicitly disabled ensurepip. * On macOS, setuptools will be installed if they’re using the system Python, the python.org installers (which are not uninstallable), or Python from Homebrew. The last two also have pip, and system Python has ensurepip. * On Linux, setuptools/pip is likely to be there, but it’s not required in all distributions. (Fedora mandates setuptools; Debian even rips out ensurepip by default and hides it in python3-venv because reasons…) If the users are meant to install Python packages, their system administrators would take care of that — either by setting up setuptools/pip and perhaps virtualenv, or taking install requests from users. If users are not supposed to be running setuptools/pip, they probably shouldn’t, but they can still install it from ensurepip or downloading get-pip.py. > I've worked in places where installing unauthorized software was a > firing offence. Those people don’t need setuptools. Those people should not be using distutils either. They might not even be allowed to download packages and run __main__.py without installation. -- Chris Warrick <https://chriswarrick.com/> PGP: 5EAAEA16 _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
