Support keyring when installed with pipx

[judahrand]

What's the problem this feature will solve?

Currently to use keyring it needs to be in the same venv as pip. This seems like an unhelpful limitation as keyring feels like a system-level tool which fits nicely with pipx.

Describe the solution you'd like

Rather than importing keyring pip could call the command line version of the tool. This would work as long as keyring is available in PATH.

Alternative Solutions

Open to suggestions

Additional context

None

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the PSF Code of Conduct.

[pfmoore]

I don't know what the original reasons were for not doing this, but I would strongly suggest reviewing the discussions on the original keyring implementation. There was a lot of debate, and it's unlikely that this option wasn't considered at all.

Also, if we start down this route of using an external command line tool, are we likely to get requests for support for other tools to be added? The keyring support was the source of quite a few issues initially, and I don't think we want to deal with the quirks of multiple password managers...

[judahrand]

That's all very fair, however, the current state of the keyring integration makes its utility rather limited or at the very least frustrating. It isn't a great developer experience to have to run:

pip install keyring
pip install -r requirements.txt

every time.

For those of us using tools like pip-tools this becomes even more annoying as the command becomes:

pip install keyring
pip-sync requirements.txt

which strips keyring back out on the environment. This gets even worse when using plugins like keyrings.google-artifactregistry-auth.

I'd be willing to have a go reimplementing the current keyring integration if a subprocess.run alternative is likely to be accepted.

[judahrand]

Going to have a read of #5952

[judahrand]

@pfmoore It doesn't look to me like calling the command line interface was really considered in that original PR 🤔

[pfmoore]

Hmm, that's a bit of a shame. Maybe I misremembered how much discussion there was.

I guess I'm not against this idea, although it's frustrating that we'll then end up with multiple keyring interfaces to support...

[pfmoore]

Thanks for the contribution @judahrand!