Can't we do something about this bug? I think that most python devs are ignoring the severity of this one, especially because it does break distribution of packages (or at least their testing)

On OS X the experience is awful as --user doesn't work at all and as a maintainer of many python packages I end-up with a case where installing packages for the current user doesn't work. It works well on all other platforms but not on OS X (when you have the brew python). 

We cannot really expect all the package developers to spend a lot of time creating new scenarios only for trying to bypass this bug.

For the sake of our Python users let's fix this and make the Python experience a good one, especially for people that do not have much experience with python.

Maybe Santa will get my message ;) Wish you happy holidays!