[ak217]

I think you may be misunderstanding the problem being discussed. The code that uses pip will crash if pip is not already installed. There is no way to parse and satisfy the dependency on pip, because the author chose to import pip as a library.

[AndrewCHM]

pip being a dependency is defined at upload time, it is parsed by the creator of the package, not the consumer, afaik

if you used any other package manager, it would need to resolve dependencies from the additional info in the package index, resulting in pip being downloaded and installed before the desired package is installed