Hi, I've seen this before and I'm fairly sure that it's an issue from the system version of pip interacting badly with a pip-installed version of pip. However, I also cannot reproduce it now.
It has been discussed upstream [1] and a compatibility layer has been added to avoid it [2][3]. That may explain why it is seemingly unreproducible now. Instead of the error, I'm now receiving this when running a newer pip-installed version through the system-installed version: WARNING: pip is being invoked by an old script wrapper. This will fail in a future version of pip. Please see https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/5599 for advice on fixing the underlying issue. To avoid this problem you can invoke Python with '-m pip' instead of running pip directly. All in all, I think the error in this bug is likely not caused by the packaged version itself. The wrapper should probably be changed at some point, though. [1] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/5599 [2] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/7498 [3] https://github.com/pypa/pip/commit/3f4bb75 Regards, Robin