[Distutils] pip upgrade woes

[Ionel Cristian Mărieș]

Hello,

There's one issue with pip upgrade that annoys me occasionally, and when it
does it's very annoying.

Every so often me or some customer has to upgrade some core packages like
pip, setuptools or virtualenv on some machine. Now this becomes very
annoying because said packages were installed there with either
easy_install or just `setup.py install`. Several upgrades like that and now
the machine has a hadful of eggs there. Lots of mistakes were made but
what's done is done.

Now, if `pip upgrade pip setuptools virtualenv` it will run around a bit,
flap its wings and in the end it's not gonna fly like an eagle, and won't
be able to go beyond it's cursed fences. An so, I feel like chicken farmer
when I try to upgrade packages and pip can't upgrade them. Cause those old
eggs are still going to be first on sys.path. And when I try to run pip
it's still that old one.

Sometimes few `pip uninstall` solve the issue, but most of the time I have
to manually remove files because pip can't figure out what files to remove.

One big issue is that pip uninstall only uninstalls the first package it
finds, and similarly, pip install will only uninstall the first package it
finds before coping the new files.

This whole process becomes a whole lot more annoying when you have to
explain someone how to cleanup this mess and get latest pip and setuptools.

So I'm wondering if there's a better way to cleanup machines like that. Any
ideas?

Thanks,
-- Ionel Cristian Mărieș, http://blog.ionelmc.ro
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