Packages often require sudo in order to install to the global interpreter - it's a security hazard otherwise. Imagine a Python package which overrides the sys m

Packages often require sudo in order to install to the global interpreter - it's a security hazard otherwise. Imagine a Python package which overrides the sys module. If it didn't require sudo, anyone could install it and compromise Python for everyone else (or, for instance, compromise setuid programs). The two solutions here are user-local packages (pip --user, for example) and virtual environments.