Comment by nrclark
3 years ago
A note to readers: it's not always a good idea to put automated software installation in a place that users don't expect it.
I've seen that kind of approach cause a ton of issues the moment that the software was used in a different environment than the author expected.
It's much better IMO to fail with a message about how to install the missing dependency.
This is why there should be a way to automatically install software into a sandboxed location, e.g. a virtualenv.
Considering we are having software drive cars today it should be trivial and I would say even arguably expected that software should be able to autonomously "figure out" how to run itself and avoid conflicts with other software since that's a trivial task in comparison to navigating city streets.