Uninstall from pip --user install fails (sometimes)

[lofidevops]

Steps to reproduce:

• pip install --user PACKAGENAME
• pip uninstall PACKAGENAME (no --user)

What should happen:

Package is installed and uninstalled.

What happens instead:

Uninstall fails with Can't uninstall 'PACKAGE'. No files were found to uninstall.

Notes:

This is not the case with all packages. I can't determine if the issue is with the packages or pip. I know that in all cases I have encountered .local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/PACKAGE-VERSION-py2.7.egg-info/installed-files.txt exists.

Examples of failing packages include: pew-org/pew#39 and hayd/pep8radius#77 but, for example, youtube-dl works.

This is running pip 1.5.4 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

[KarlManong]

got the same problem in virtualenv

[piotr-dobrogost]

As pip uninstall does not have --user option unlike pip install the question is if there even exists a way to uninstall package installed with pip install --user?

[lofidevops]

For me, this typically works:

pip install --user PACKAGE
pip uninstall PACKAGE

On the face of it, pip uninstall --user might be better?

Notes: the packages mentioned in the ticket started working after they offered Wheel-based packages. Not sure if this is a solution or a workaround.

[dstufft]

This appears to not be a problem now, if you're still having this issue please reopen this ticket or open a new one with reproduction steps.

[foldager]

This is still a problem on a Debian system, with debian distributed packages.
I'm not administrating the system, and I just wanted to update my version of numpy.
There exists a quite old version of numpy in /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages

I run the following

pip install --user --upgrade numpy
pip uninstall numpy

The first command installs numpy, but it is not available in python, as the Debian packages precedes user packages in sys.path. The only non-sudo workaround i found is to modify sys.path inside each python script.

The next command fails as it tries to uninstall numpy from /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages