On Jul 14, 2013, at 10:43 AM, Noah Kantrowitz wrote:

> 
> On Jul 14, 2013, at 10:39 AM, Noah Kantrowitz wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jul 14, 2013, at 10:31 AM, Ian Cordasco wrote:
>> 
>>> On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 1:12 PM, Noah Kantrowitz <[email protected]> 
>>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On Jul 14, 2013, at 9:45 AM, Steve Dower wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> From: Paul Moore
>>>>>> On 13 July 2013 10:05, Paul Moore <[email protected]> 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?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Unless I misunderstand how the exe wrappers work (they're all the same 
>>>>> code that looks for a .py file by the same name?) it may be easiest to 
>>>>> somehow mark them as non-vital, such that failing to update them does not 
>>>>> fail the installer. Maybe detect that it can't be overwritten, compare 
>>>>> the contents/hash with the new one, and only fail if it's changed (with 
>>>>> an instruction to use 'python -m...')?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Spawning a separate process to do the install is probably no good, since 
>>>>> you'd have to kill the original one which is going to break command line 
>>>>> output.
>>>>> 
>>>>> MoveFileEx (with its copy-on-reboot flag) is off the table, since it 
>>>>> requires elevation and a reboot. But I think that's the only supported 
>>>>> API for doing a deferred copy.
>>>>> 
>>>>> If Windows was opening .exes with FILE_SHARE_DELETE then it would be 
>>>>> possible to delete the exe and create a new one by the same name, but I 
>>>>> doubt that will work and in any case could not be assumed to never change.
>>>>> 
>>>>> So unless the exe wrapper is changing with each version, I think the best 
>>>>> way of handling this is to not force them to be replaced when they have 
>>>>> not changed.
>>>> 
>>>> The usual way to do this is just move the existing executable to 
>>>> pip.exe.deleteme or something, and then write out the new one. Then on 
>>>> every startup (or maybe some level of special case for just pip upgrades?) 
>>>> try to unlink *.deleteme. Not the simplest system ever, but it gets the 
>>>> job done.
>>> 
>>> I accidentally only emailed Paul earlier, but why can't we upgrade the
>>> pip module with the exe and then replace the process (using something
>>> in the os.exec* family) with `python -m pip update-exe` which could
>>> then succeed since the OS isn't holding onto the exe file? I could be
>>> missing something entirely obvious since I haven't developed
>>> (directly) on or for Windows in at least 5 years.
>> 
>> Unfortunately windows doesn't actually offer the equivalent of a POSIX 
>> exec(). The various functions in os don't actually replace the current 
>> process, they just create a new one and terminate the old one. This means 
>> the controlling terminal would see the pip process as ended, so it makes 
>> showing output difficult at best.
> 
> Check that, maybe I'm wrong, does anyone know if the P_OVERLAY flag unlocks 
> the original binary? /me drags out a windows VM …

Ignore my ignoring, with os.execl command flow does return back to the 
controlling terminal process (the new process continues in the background) and 
with os.spawnl(os.P_OVERLAY, 'python-2') I just get a segfault on 3.3. Yay for 
not completely misremembering, boo for this being so complicated.

--Noah

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