pip install --user -e tries to uninstall system-wide version, unlike pip install --user

• Pip version: 9.0.1
• Python version: 3.6
• Operating system: Arch Linux

Description:

Tried to install pylint in user, editable mode. Failed as pip tries to uninstall the system-wide version. While this could be a reasonable behavior, this is inconsistent with non-editable installs, which do NOT attempt to remove the system-wide version

What I’ve run:

$ pip install --user -e . # from pylint source directory, fails with permission error
$ pip install --user . # works, doesn't try to remove syswide install

[ppham27]

As a workaround, it works to do pip install --user . && pip install --user -e . to hack pip into just overwriting the user version. To make this even quicker, I just copy over the *.dist-info folder.

[iuriguilherme]

I see the same behaviour even with a minimal setup.py file (the import setuptools; setuptools.setup() one).

Workaround is forcing virtual environment and running pip install -e . - the setup.cfg would need to duplicate requirements.txt or equivalent with it’s own install_requires =, but that’s probably already done