pip >= 8.0.0 fails because of egg-info files in python stdlib

[Florian Kisser]

Up-to-date pip might fail because ubuntu ships some egg-info files for stdlib packages in /usr/lib/python2.7/, but egg-info files are only for locally installed packages.

How to reproduce with argparse:

$ virtualenv venv
$ . venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -U pip
$ pip install -U argparse
Collecting argparse
  Downloading argparse-1.4.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Installing collected packages: argparse
  Found existing installation: argparse 1.2.1
Detected a distutils installed project ('argparse') which we cannot uninstall. The metadata provided by distutils does not contain a list of files which have been installed, so pip does not know which files to uninstall.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

no, egg-info files are not only for locally installed packages. almost every Python module in Ubuntu is shipped with an egg-info file.

[Florian Kisser (flok)]

Yes, but not for python stdlib. This is Debian/Ubuntu specific (see debian/rules line 1040). Pip worked around this, but this strange patching might cause errors again in the future.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

OTOH, we're hoping pip will learn how to work better with distro provided packages.