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Installing pip for Python 3 may overwrite Python 2 scripts #1294
Description
pip installs the unversioned scripts for pip and easy_install unconditionally, even when running in a global Python 3 install on a *nix system with a shared binary directory.
This issue currently affects the ensurepip bundling with CPython: http://bugs.python.org/issue19406
At the very least, we need pip to support an "--altinstall" equivalent that only installs the fully qualified versioned scripts.
It would also be useful to be able to install just pip3 and pip3.4 without installing the unqualified version (we would probably configure ensurepip to do that by default when outside virtual environments on *nix systems).
Activity
dstufft commentedon Nov 4, 2013
So the versioned commands are a hack right now that we added until metadata 2.0 has proper support for them. Due to their hackish nature we're loathe to add a "proper" support for them until metadata 2.0 has and figuring out how to handle that case in the general case with flags or what not.
So what i'd like to do, thinking about it. Is a hidden flag or environment variable that
ensurepipcould use to say which scripts it wants installed. This would be undocumented and exist soley for ensurepip. Then when metadata 2.0 gets proper support for this feature we can expose real flags after some discussion about how to do that.Does that sound reasonable?
pfmoore commentedon Nov 4, 2013
Agreed, let's not try to solve this issue "properly" without metadata support.
Is there a list of issues that need to be considered for the entry point / script wrapper support in metadata 2.0? This issue should be captured on that so that it doesn't get forgotten when we do have that debate.
ncoghlan commentedon Nov 4, 2013
Sounds good - metadata issues can be reported against the PyPA metadata
project on BitBucket.