Can't uninstall package installed with sudo pip install -e - "No files were found to uninstall."

[Poupine]

• Pip version: 10.0.1
• Python version: 3.5
• Operating system: Ubuntu Xenial

When installing a local package with sudo -H pip3 install -e <path-to-my-package>, my package is found and imported as expected, but the way it is done is possibly the worst that could possibly have been implemented ...

Let me explain: what it does, is somehow adding <path-to-my-package> in my python path in some obscure way and when I run sudo -H pip3 uninstall <my-package-name>, I am greeted with the following message: Can't uninstall '<my-package-name>'. No files were found to uninstall.

Where it becomes annoying is that even after deleting the egg-link file corresponding to my package from dist-packages, my python path still has the path to my library which means if my library is broken (which happened twice already in the span of 2 days with 2 different libraries), I am stuck with an unusable version of my library.

The only solution I have found so far to this, since I have no idea how the path to my library gets written to the python path, has been to wipe clean python and pip from my system and reinstall from scratch.

PS: Installing without -e has the correct behaviour (as in when I uninstall my package it actually does uninstall it).

[FragLegs]

I have found similar problems uninstalling an editable install with any version of pip >= 10.0.0

Steps to reproduce are below. I'm using mkproject from virtualenvwrapper for efficiency and editable installing requests but it happens with any package.

mkproject pip-issue
pip install pip==10.0.0
git clone git@github.com:requests/requests.git .
pip install -e .
pip uninstall requests

I get the following error:

Not uninstalling requests at /home/smiel/projects/pip-issue, outside environment /home/smiel/.venvs/pip-issue
Can't uninstall 'requests'. No files were found to uninstall.

Python version: 2.7.12
OS: Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS

[hpk42]

i also get "uninstall" problems for packages which i installed with "pip install -e .". it's consistent and happens with newest virtualenv (16.0) and pip (10.0.1) on my ubu16.04.

Downgrading to pip-0.9.3 fixes the issue, i can uninstall again.

[chrahunt]

@FragLegs that looks different to me - if this is still affecting you please feel free to create a new issue so we can take a look.

Hi @Poupine - the .egg-link file is how setuptools keeps track of the mapping between the editable project name and the actual source directory, but the project gets onto sys.path via easy-install.pth. If you remove the directory from easy-install.pth in the corresponding site-packages directory then your library should no longer be available in the environment.

For the underlying issue, this looks like it could be the same as #5193. Can you provide clear instructions to reproduce this so we can confirm it?

[no-response]

This issue has been automatically closed because there has been no response to our request for more information from the original author. With only the information that is currently in the issue, we don't have enough information to take action. Please reach out if you have or find the answers we need so that we can investigate further.