What’s the proper way to install pip, virtualenv, and distribute for Python?

Short Question

• What is the proper way to install pip, virtualenv, and distribute?

Background

In my answer to SO question 4314376, I recommended using ez_setup so that you could then install pip and virtualenv as follows:

curl -O http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
sudo python ez_setup.py
sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install virtualenv

I originally pulled these instructions from Jesse Noller’s blog post So you want to use Python on the Mac?. I like the idea of keeping a clean global site-packages directory, so the only other packages I install there are virtualenvwrapper and distribute. (I recently added distribute to my toolbox because of this Python public service announcement. To install these two packages, I used:

sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper
curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
sudo python distribute_setup.py

No more setuptools and easy_install

To really follow that Python public service announcement, on a fresh Python install, I would do the following:

curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
sudo python distribute_setup.py
sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install virtualenv
sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper

Glyph’s Rebuke

In a comment to my answer to SO question 4314376, SO user Glyph stated:

NO. NEVER EVER do sudo python setup.py install whatever. Write a ~/.pydistutils.cfg that puts your pip installation into ~/.local or something. Especially files named ez_setup.py tend to suck down newer versions of things like setuptools and easy_install, which can potentially break other things on your operating system.

Back to the short question

So Glyph’s response leads me to my original question:

• What is the proper way to install pip, virtualenv, and distribute?