On Sat, 2 Oct 2021 at 03:27, Illia Volochii <illia.voloc...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > ensurepip includes private copies of pip and setuptools. But PEP 453 states > that "once pip is able to run pip install --upgrade pip without needing > setuptools installed first, then the private copy of setuptools will be > removed from ensurepip in subsequent CPython releases." > https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0453/#automatic-installation-of-setuptools
Interesting. Pip does not need setuptools installed to upgrade itself, so a strict reading of the PEP would seem to imply that we need to remove setuptools, as you say. However, looking at things more practically, pip still needs setuptools to do "legacy" installs of source distributions (when the project does not include a `pyproject.toml`) and for editable installs of setuptools-based projects. If we stopped shipping setuptools as part of ensurepip, I imagine people would complain that we'd "broken" things. Telling them that it's not broken, all they need to do is `pip install setuptools`, and we only ever promised that the supplied pip could be used to bootstrap a full environment, doesn't seem likely to go down well IMO. (Technically, some aspects of pip don't work, or fall back to "legacy" code paths, if the `wheel` project isn't installed, so ensurepip "needs" wheel in the same sense as it "needs" setuptools, but the breakage is less significant, and people who care are used to the current situation and know what to do. So yes, that argues we could do the same to setuptools, it's just a bigger impact.) > At the moment pip itself includes a needed part of setuptools. > https://github.com/pypa/pip/tree/9c474d4862907ae220ced0fcdbd76660955ff732/src/pip/_vendor/pkg_resources That's internal to pip, and the pip code that uses that, does not need an externally-supplied setuptools. > I experimented with modifying ensurepip in the main branch not to install > setuptools, and then used it to install pip. It worked fine. > Then I run `./python -m pip install --upgrade pip`, and it upgraded pip > successfully. > > Does this mean that we can drop the copy of setuptools? IMO, it's too early to consider dropping setuptools, notwithstanding what a strict reading of the PEP says. When pip has removed more of the "legacy" code paths, this situation could change, but we're not there yet. Paul _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/AM7ATX4IWLNXKG54Z34GYZ2D7RJWQUNC/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
