On 27 April 2017 at 11:47, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Nothing is changing in terms of *recommended* practices. This change proposal is entirely about harm mitigation for the cases where users *do* run "sudo pip ...", either because that's their instinctive reaction to a permissions error, or because some misguided installation instructions for a 3rd party package advised them to do it. Debian and derivatives already mitigate the potential harm for these cases by requiring the "--install-layout=deb" option to be passed to get distutils to install into the system directories rather than doing it by default: https://wiki.debian.org/Python#Deviations_from_upstream Their approach means that any harm caused by "sudo pip install X" can subsequently be fully reversed by doing "sudo pip uninstall X". At this moment, this is NOT true for Fedora and derivatives. Instead, the remediation step here is "sudo pip uninstall X && sudo dnf reinstall <something>" where you have to: 1. Figure out what "<something>" needs to be 2. Hope that whatever you broke didn't affect your ability to run "sudo dnf reinstall" Nico, the contemptuous tone you have adopted in this post is entirely inappropriate. Please give other list participants the courtesy of assuming expertise at least equivalent to your own, rather than engaging in attempted displays of assumed superiority. This isn't true, as long as the fix is as simple as using pip to uninstall whatever problematic package you just installed. At the moment, that isn't the case on Fedora and derivatives, since "sudo pip install ..." can actually *corrupt* a system package installation, rather than merely shadowing it at import time the way it does on Debian et al. The goal of this change isn't to allow co-existence of arbitrary upstream and downstream versions as supported combinations - it's to make sure that forced installation of an incompatible upstream version is an easily reversible error, rather than a potentially system-breaking mistake. The problem is that the default behaviour needs to change (to mitigate the potential harm caused by a relatively common end user error), but unlike Debian package builds (which know they need to set "--install-layout=deb"), most RPM builds for Python packages currently rely on that default behaviour as part of the build process. Changing the default indiscriminately would thus be a breaking change that not only affects Fedora RPM builds, but also COPR and other third party RPM builds. So we need a solution that retains the existing behaviour for RPM builds, but changes the behaviour to be less potentially destructive when run interactively at a shell prompt, or as part of a configuration management script. That is not the goal of the change. Improving the level of commonality and collaboration between Fedora & Mageia's pyp2rpm and openSUSE's py2pack would indeed be desirable, but it's entirely orthogonal to the harm mitigation exercise being discussed here. Helping users that are already doing the right thing isn't the problem at hand - this is about making it easier for users to recover from doing the *wrong* thing. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan(a)gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia