I’m to this forum and maybe this has been purposed already. The message currently being delivered from pip search is a bad UX experience. Considering that Python is a language often picked up by those new to programming and pip search is used to explore the Python packages available, it seems to make more sense to return a non-stack trace response. Something long the lines of:
pip search is currently disabled and may be removed in the future. Use https://pypi.org to search for packages in the meantime until a solution is devised.
This way people that just started down the programming path don’t feel like they did something wrong or broke something. I know that doesn’t concern folx that have been in the Python space for any given period of time, but the language is only growing in popularity and since humans use these tools it might worth it from a UX experience.
This is certainly better. The concern I have with this solution is that the action on the user’s part, using pip search to find a package, is not an error from the user’s perspective so getting this response could still be confusing and unhelpful.
I am unsure what you’re asking. Is it the ERROR: prefix that’s bothering you?
It is my understanding that “Error” in software generally means the software has encounter an error, not that the user has made an error. This may or may not be what newcomers expect—I suspect it is, since peoeple see software emit “errors” often outside of programming contexts these days. But even if it’s not expected, it is still a semantic they’ll need to learn sooner or later, since Python use this word a lot to refer to non-user errors (e.g. BrokenPipeError). pip not categorising this as an error would not really solve, only delay the issue for them.