On 13 July 2013 10:05, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote: > How robust is the process of upgrading pip using itself? Specifically on > Windows, where these things typically seem less reliable.
OK, I just did some tests. On Windows, "pip install -U pip" FAILS. The reason for the failure is simple enough to explain - the pip.exe wrapper is held open by the OS while it's in use, so that the upgrade cannot replace it. The result is a failed upgrade and a partially installed new version of pip. In practice, the exe stubs are probably added fairly late in the install (at least when installing from sdist, with a wheel that depends on the order of the files in the wheel), so it's probably only a little bit broken, but "a little bit broken" is still broken :-( On the other hand, "python -m pip install -U pip" works fine because it avoids the exe wrappers. There's a lot of scope for user confusion and frustration in all this. For standalone pip I've tended to recommend "don't do that" - manually uninstall and reinstall pip, or recreate your virtualenv. It's not nice, but it's effective. That sort of advice isn't going to be realistic for a pip bundled with CPython. Does anyone have any suggestions? Paul. PS In better news, apart from this issue, pip upgrades of pip and setuptools seem fine.
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