To be fair, the core of the PEP is nothing more than adding a couple of entries to sys.path on startup. That’s neither more nor less useful than the fact that the current directory, or python.zip, is added to sys.path on startup - it’s of benefit for certain expected use cases, and does no harm if not used.
The problem lies in the fact that the motivation for the change is around particular ways of using that addition. And there’s a lot of confusion and mistaken expectations about those changes to workflows - which isn’t helped by the many years this PEP has been around, and people’s speculation about what might happen.
Yes, the current version of the PEP[1] suggests changes to pip as well, but (1) these have significant issues around backward compatibility, and (2) a core PEP isn’t the right place to propose changes to pip’s UI anyway. We’ll thrash out how pip wants to respond to this PEP if it gets accepted on pip’s tracker, not here.
Maybe in the end, the PEP is something that doesn’t appeal to people. Maybe just adding entries to sys.path is a compromise that doesn’t do enough to be useful. That’s fine, in that case the PEP will be rejected.
There’s a revision in the works. ↩︎