pip list should tell the truth and provide more info

[warsaw]

Currently pip list gives me some output indicating installed packages, but this is misleading. All of the packages displayed are really installed by my OS package manager so really aren't part of pip's responsibility.

There should be a way for pip to only report packages that were actually installed by pip.

Also, pip info -v should display the paths it found the packages in. Otherwise, it doesn't seem possible to know whether they are installed in ~/.local or /usr/local (or in the above case, /usr).

[qwcode]

related issue: #1646 : "implement INSTALLER from PEP376"

[pfmoore]

Certainly pip list should report the INSTALLER info. Even if pip doesn't write it yet, other installers (like the OS package manager) could start doing so and that would give Barry the information he's after. Whether it's right to not list things that are installed and importable, but weren't installed by pip, I'm not so sure of. I use pip list to see what's available and I'd expect to see something even if it wasn't installed by pip (as long as I could import/use it).

[dstufft]

I agree we should not hide something from pip list just because we didn't install it. I'm OK with a flag that says pip list -only-pip or something. And I'm OK with making it obvious which things in pip list are installed by pip and which aren't.

[warsaw]

On Apr 10, 2014, at 10:16 AM, Donald Stufft wrote:

I agree we should not hide something from pip list just because we didn't
install it. I'm OK with a flag that says pip list -only-pip or
something. And I'm OK with making it obvious which things in pip list are
installed by pip and which aren't.

Maybe the default for pip list should only be the things that pip has
responsibility for, i.e. the things it can remove. You can't pip remove
any packages installed by the system. Thus pip list should probably gain
a --everything switch to opt-into printing everything.

[pfmoore]

Maybe the default for pip list should only be the things that pip has
responsibility for, i.e. the things it can remove. You can't pip remove
any packages installed by the system.

-1 on defaulting to anything other than all available distributions.

Generally, I use pip list to see what's installed, not to see what I can remove. So I'd argue for a default of everything, and a flag to limit to only pip-installed projects (maybe something like --installer=pip where the --installer flag selects based on what's in INSTALLER).

[merwok]

I agree with Paul. OS packages started including egg-info metadata precisely to allow Python-level installers (at the time, easy_install) to see what was already available.

[Ivoz]

-1 on changing the default.

I also like the idea of a flag to limit output, I'm hoping to still implement that.

[dstufft]

Closing this as we're not going to limit the output to hide system install packages, however it would be useful to mention if they were installed by the system or pip. Fortunately we have an issue for that already, which is #949.