On 24 July 2013 10:38, ncoghlan <notifications@github.com> wrote:

> The *only* instructions virtualenv offers that are suitable for a new user
> are the ones based on pip, so there's really no reason to reference them at
> all. On Windows, none of the shell commands will work, and on Linux and Mac
> OS X, beginners have no justification for installing anything into their
> system Python, because they *will* break it and have much bigger things to
> worry about than how to bootstrap Python's package installation tools.


I'd suggest a pull request for virtualenv, then. Add a get-virtualenv.py
script that puts *just* virtualenv.py and the virtualenv_support directory
somewhere, and update the instructions to say use that, put the target
location on PATH, and use that standalone virtualenv.

That would be my preferred "how to bootstrap virtualenv" solution. It's
what I do manually and it works very well. It's only missing an automated
bootstrap script to make it newcomer-friendly.