simplifying the install page

[Tim Graham]

The install page mentions several different ways to install Django, from pip install (recommended), to `setup.py install`, to symlinking the Django checkout in your site-packages. Do you see any reason to keep the latter methods instead of recommending pip all the time?

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/install/

[Daniele Procida]

I can't see any good reason to keep symlink method, but maybe I am missing something.

I'd prefer to see the use of virtualenv built-in to the process from the very start, and a quickstart version of the instructions as the first thing that people see:

virtualenv django-virtualenv
source django-virtualenv/bin/activate
pip install django

I know that's not so simple, and that Windows users need to do something a bit different, but at least seeing something that simple near the top of the document would be a promise that installation *can* be that easy.

Daniele

[Collin Anderson]

Yeah, I bet we could get rid of the entire "Installing an official
release manually" section, as I assume we don't actually want to
recommend that. Also, the "Installing the development version" section
outlines a more manual way already.

It makes sense to me to tell people to "install virtualenv" rather
than to "install pip".

We could might want to link to virtualenv's instructions for
installing itself. They show a way of downloading and using virtualenv
without root, which some beginners (I'm thinking college students)
might not have.
https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/installation.html

It's worth noting too, that although newer versions of python include
pip and venv, some distros have decided not to install pip and venv by
default.

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-develop...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to django-d...@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/20150925170726.2021833171%40mail.wservices.ch.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Tim Graham]

Thanks for the feedback. Here's a proposal: https://github.com/django/django/pull/5360