On January 25, 2021, Lars-Dominik Braun <lars@6xq.net> wrote:

> Being able to demote setuptools and pip

> to ordinary packages is merely a side-effect, because they’re not

> essential any more.



I didn't read all of PEP 517, does it deprecate bundling pip with

Python? My understanding was that it just gives maintainers more options

and makes setuptools less of a de-facto standard. I'll read it more

thoroughly later and see if I missed some important info there.



Anyhow, even if a PEP says so, people's expectations to be able to use

pip will not disappear suddenly. It's part of the expected interface to

Python & I imagine removing it has the potential to cause much

confusion.



> Your mail seems to be incomplete, it stopped after:

> > Also, for what it's worth, we already have python-minimal which

> doesn't

> > have pip, and it's only



Ah darn, I'd meant to write it's only a little bit smaller, and I'm

interested to see where we can slim down the Python closure but others

have managed to do so without cutting out pip & setuptools.



All this being said, I'm not a huge fan of pip & setuptools, I like Guix

because it frees me from having to think so much about such things, so I

hope this doesn't come off as a defense of the tools themselves. I mean

to defend the many Python users who have been trained with a certain set

of expectations about the interfaces a Python package provides.