Playing nice with external package managers

[geofft (Geoffrey Thomas)]

I think many of the folks on this thread have seen it, but we had some further discussions on the topic at this year’s PyCon, which has resulted in a new PEP that hopefully addresses this in a little more general way:

PEP 668: Marking Python base environments as "externally managed"

At the “Linux in Distros” sprint at PyCon US in May, we drafted a PEP about making external package managers like apt/dnf/etc. and Python-specific package managers like pip play more nicely together. This includes the “sudo pip install” problem, but it’s a little more general than that. The short version is it has two recommendations: When a distro indicates it’s managing a Python installation, tools like pip should only install into a virtualenv, by default (with a way to override it), and …