pip 19.0 has been released on 22nd January 2019. On the feature list most notably it now supports PEP-517, which by default is turned on when that the project has a pyproject.toml at the root folder. The PEP in question has been created in 2015 and accepted in 2017. Even though it took a while until pip implemented it, the release and the issues that followed it up confirmed that many people are n