[Distutils] distribute-0.6.35 fails on python 3.3?

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 7:24 AM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 7:21 AM, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Can anyone else reproduce this?
>
> Essentially pip can not upgrade distribute or setuptools on Python 3.
>
> This is annoying, and it seems the easiest way to solve it is to stop
> using 2to3 for distribute.
> This is a massive change though, and since the test coverage is dismal
> its' going to create loads of bugs. But perhaps we simply need to
> accept that.

It has always been problematic to upgrade distribute (a pip
dependency) with pip. Under certain circumstances pip can uninstall
distribute before trying to install it again, which fails because at
that point distribute isn't installed. On Windows and on Python 3 the
issue is worse due to 2to3 and file locking issues.

Virtualenv is a more reliable way to upgrade distribute.