The idea is to add a method to pip that tries to import a package and if the import fails then try to download and install the package handling the UI.

Yes, you can put the package as a dependency in your pip config for 
your code.  This is intended for the case when you have a bunch of 
python tools/libs in some shared repository in your organization.
People check the code out and expect it to run but it has third party 
dependencies.  There is no install step for your code, per se.  Furthermore the people using your code don't know enough about python to install things themselves.

Proposed syntax is:

import pip
pip.require("foo")

If you search online for pip.main you'll see a whole bunch of hall-baked brittle solutions to this problem that look like this:

try:
    import foo
except ImportError:
     pip.main("install", "foo")

I'm more than happy to fill in the contributor agreement.. but it seems like a hassle if, what I'm assuming will happen, someone points out a good reason why this hasn't been done already.

But in fact, Pip is an external project to CPython.

Could you explain why you post this issue in the CPython Bug Tracker?

Thank you

Thanks for the report, but this should be discussed either at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pypa-dev or https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues

Righto.. will talk to the pip dudes.  Thanks for your time.  

(@matrixise The reason I posted this here is because pip is included as part of the cpython distribution.  None of the documentation I've seen suggests that this isn't a forum for discussing the std python libs, and indeed there seem to be many enhancement requests for python libs in this bug db.  It seems that pip has some special status as included as part of the std python distribution but not part of the std libs.  I would have thought that it was obvious from the context that I was unaware of this fact at the time I posted the request.  Does that answer your question?  What's with the attitude?  You've never made a mistake I take it?).