What is the relationship between pip, pyinstall and easy_install?

Question

It seems to me that easy_install was forked, renamed to pyinstall, forked again and renamed to pip. Is that right? Are there any sources for it?

Are easy_install / pyinstall still used?

(I have found https://github.com/pyinstaller/pyinstaller and https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyinstall which seem to support this)

Answer 1

easy_install still exists, but is largely deprecated due to basically not being as good as pip (see discussion here). pyinstall is just the old name for pip; it's obsolete.

More discussion on pip vs. easy_install here.