> Isn't that really obviously about five steps too many to be considered a reasonable way of installing a package?
That's why I use pipx. But the activation and deactivation in that example are completely unnecessary, and the last line is just using the installed package. Installation actually looks like:
$ python -m venv ~/venv/yt-dlp
$ ~/venv/yt-dlp/bin/pip install yt-dlp
$ ln -s ~/venv/yt-dlp/bin/yt-dlp ~/bin/yt-dlp
which is only two steps too many if we acknowledge that there has to be at least one step. This all of course can also just be put in a shell script, or a function in your ~/.bashrc.
Pip just happens to be laser focused on the actual installation of packages, so it doesn't provide that wrapper. (With PAPER I'm aiming for slightly broader scope, but still something intended specifically for users that's only one piece of a developer toolchain.)
> (And you didn't handle getting an appropriate version of python installed.)
When was the last time you tried to obtain an application that could be installed as a PyPI package and your system Python wasn't compatible? Everyone knows the CPython release cadence now and is strongly pressured to advance their own support in lock-step with that. Similarly for libraries. There's already a full set of wheels for the latest version of NumPy for 3.14, 22 of them. Even musl-based distributions are provided for. Even 32-bit Windows is provided for, for those few holdouts.
If your target audience doesn't have Python and understand on a basic level what that is, why will they be able to understand using the uv command line and accept using that to install a program?
