Pip plans to introduce an alternative (zipapp) deployment method

[pf_moore (Paul Moore)]

@CAM-Gerlach

However, I maintain or am involved with several smaller projects (off the top of my head, Mjolnir/Brokkr, Lektor, Pyroma, etc.) that also rely on pip being present in different types of environments to do various things, and as they are generally pretty lightweight, often structured more as libraries than applications, and may be deployed without an internet connection, pretty much any approach imposes some sort of cost:

• Adding a dependency on pip prevents using pip standalone, but otherwise is the least cost to return to the status quo
• Not supporting pip in pip-less environments breaks the functionality or requires tedious user action which negates much of the benefits
• Downloading and installing a zipapp is not trivial and requires an internet connection, which is not always available in the contexts which many of the above packages run
• Adding a config option requires some form of config system and manual intervention from each user (unless built into automated deployment)
• Attempting to find the user’s installed zipapp pip requires a non-trivial amount of platform-specific hacky code that may or may not be reliable, and may still not work in a many cases

Thank you. This is precisely the sort of feedback I was looking for. One further question, then. If you got a bug report today from someone trying to use these tools in an environment they had created using python -m venv --without-pip, what would you say to them? Because whether you are aware of it or not, you do currently have some policy on such environments, it’s just unlikely that it’s ever happened.

@CAM-Gerlach

Also, to note, just executing pip without calling it with the sys.executable of the target environment could very well run pip on the wrong environment, since there is no guarantee it will point to the same Python executable we’re running, particularly with conda environments where activation is quite non-trivial

Yes, I’ve been using the zipapp recently for testing, and I find the need to remember to activate the environment before calling pip to be mildly frustrating. It’s a shame Python doesn’t have a "search for the script to run on PATH option, as python --use-path pip.pyz would be a pretty convenient replacement for python -m pip, but python /absolute/path/to/pip.pyz not so much…