What is the difference between flit install and pip install?

[venthur]

What does the flit install provide that is not covered by pip install? As a developer i mainly care about pip install -e ., does it make a difference to use flit install --symlink or pip for that?

Currently the documentation only says:

Install the package on your system.

By default, the package is installed to the same Python environment that Flit itself is installed in; use --python or FLIT_INSTALL_PYTHON to override this.

If you don’t have permission to modify the environment (e.g. the system Python on Linux), Flit may do a user install instead. Use the --user or --env flags to force this one way or the other, rather than letting Flit guess.

it would be nice to elaborate on the difference between pip install and flit install here.

[takluyver]

It's the same, except that flit install --symlink works in a slightly different way to pip install -e . (and a way that I happen to prefer).