Maybe advise "pip install --user"

[felixhummel]

Hi,

I always look for ways to advertise pip install --user and I believe eg to be very user specific, so maybe it makes sense to change the README to say the following:

Installation

With pip For Your User

pip install --user
echo 'PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin' >> $HOME/.bashrc
exec $SHELL

What do you think?

Cheers, Felix

PS: For those interested here is the talk where I got this idea from: Youtube / PyVideo

[srsudar]

Interesting. That looks like a very useful video. Most of my pip/pypi knowledge has come from googling and trial and error, so I'll have to watch it in its entirety.

I vote to keep the installation example without the --user flag. Most installation examples I see omit the --user flag, for better or worse, and I think there's something to be said for consistency. If I was installing something, having to edit my .bashrc for a basic pip install might scare me off (I also use zsh, so I'd get into trouble following that example directly, and on my mac I'd have to do it to .bash_profile!).

The video claims that your home directory is an entry on sys.path, implying that installation via the --user flag should work. It's not on my sys.path, however (although exactly why, I'm not sure), which is why I think your echo statement would be necessary.

I think the --user-less pip install example is a good base case that power users can expand upon to decide if they want to install just to their user directory.

As for eg being user-specific, to a certain extent I think you're right. In general, however, I imagine user-defined extension examples will be stored in user-specific directories, so I think a global install would still be ok.