pip install --user -e tries to uninstall system-wide version, unlike pip install --user

[anntzer]

• Pip version: 9.0.1
• Python version: 3.6
• Operating system: Arch Linux

Description:

Tried to install pylint in user, editable mode. Failed as pip tries to uninstall the system-wide version.
While this could be a reasonable behavior, this is inconsistent with non-editable installs, which do NOT attempt to remove the system-wide version

What I've run:

$ pip install --user -e . # from pylint source directory, fails with permission error
$ pip install --user . # works, doesn't try to remove syswide install

[piotr-dobrogost]

this is inconsistent with non-editable installs

Did you mean to say with non --user here?

I guess using --user with --editable is something almost no one does as most people install editable packages in virtualenvs I guess.

Funny, there's no editable label.

[anntzer]

Sorry, I meant with non-editable, user installs. The example code was incorrect, I changed it.

[pradyunsg]

Relevant here: #4575

[ppham27]

As a workaround, it works to do pip install --user . && pip install --user -e . to hack pip into just overwriting the user version. To make this even quicker, I just copy over the *.dist-info folder.

[ssbarnea]

@ppham27 I am not sure if that workaround no longer works in general but for packages that dropped setup.py it clearly does not work. In fact I see quite weird logs considering that my package fully switched to pyproject.toml and dropped setup.py file.

See https://gist.github.com/ssbarnea/d74648c926efc991999d227d2c379981

The irony is that while it fails, pip freeze reports the install as molecule @ file:///home/ssbarnea/c/molecule which looks bit like an editable.

[iuriguilherme]

I see the same behaviour even with a minimal setup.py file (the import setuptools; setuptools.setup() one).

Workaround is forcing virtual environment and running pip install -e . - the setup.cfg would need to duplicate requirements.txt or equivalent with it's own install_requires =, but that's probably already done