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.