ResolutionTooDeep error message

[ei8fdb]

Work-in-progress.

What's the problem this feature will solve?

Describe the solution you'd like

First solution will be:

• write short message to include a link adding "please report this to the pip issue tracker" prompt to the error message"

Alternative Solutions

Additional context

Real life cases of ResolutionTooDeep - #8204, #8316, #8314, #8290,

[ei8fdb]

Due to parameter changes, the priority coming up with a ResolutionTooDeep error message has been reduced. I'm going to keep this on the back-burner and will get back to it.

[nlhkabu]

I'm thinking something like this might work:

Error: ResolutionTooDeep
Pip has timed out while trying to install your package dependencies. Please open an issue on the pip issue tracker to report this error: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/

Would be nice here to link to the resolver error message template, but the URL is very long:
https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/new?labels%5B%5D=K%3A+UX&labels%5B%5D=K%3A+crash&labels%5B%5D=C%3A+new+resolver&labels%5B%5D=C%3A+dependency+resolution&template=resolver-failure.md

@ei8fdb suggested that we might be able to use GitHub's URL shortener, but we'd want to check that users trust it.

fyi @uranusjr

[uranusjr]

The message looks good to me in general, except “timed out” could potentially be misleading since it sounds like a networking term to me. Maybe change it to something more vague like pip has spent too long while…?

It seems that this URL also points to the error message template. Would it be short enough? Or maybe we can set up some kind of URL shortener service for this. https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/new?template=resolver-failure.md

[pradyunsg]

GitHub's URL shortener

https://git.io/

---

One point I'd flag is "Timed out" and "Too long" seems to imply time is the factor for determining when to stop, whereas I think we should say something like "tried too many package versions" instead.

[nlhkabu]

🤔 A few options:

Error: ResolutionTooDeep
Pip has tried too many package versions while trying to install your package dependencies. Please open an issue on the pip issue tracker to report this error: https://git.io/Jfdrd

Error: ResolutionTooDeep
Pip has spent too much computing power while trying to install your package dependencies. Please open an issue on the pip issue tracker to report this error: https://git.io/Jfdrd

Error: ResolutionTooDeep
Pip has tried and failed too many times while trying to install your package dependencies. Please open an issue on the pip issue tracker to report this error: https://git.io/Jfdrd

Error: ResolutionTooDeep
Pip has failed too many times while trying to install compatible versions of your package dependencies. Please open an issue on the pip issue tracker to report this error: https://git.io/Jfdrd

I think the last one is probably most accurate. what do you think?

[uranusjr]

All of the options sound good to me.

[nlhkabu]

@ei8fdb do you have a preference here?

[pradyunsg]

First and last work well for me. OK with the third. :)

[nlhkabu]

Taking an executive decision here. If there are no strong objections, we will go with a more concise edit of version 4:

Error: ResolutionTooDeep
Pip has failed too many times while trying to install compatible package versions. Please open an issue on the pip issue tracker to report this error: https://git.io/Jfdrd

Next steps:

• Make PR
• UX team to test message with users to make sure they trust the link shortener

[ei8fdb]

UX team to test message with users to make sure they trust the link shortener

I'll do some research on this. I hope to get initial answers by end of week (26th June).

[brainwane]

Per a meeting earlier this month, we've now improved the error message and the current behavior is acceptable for the pip 20.3 release. There's still room for improvement, so I'm leaving the issue open, but I've removed it from the list of blockers for pip 20.3.

[pradyunsg]

Closing this out, since we don't see any more user reports of people hitting this.

I think we've made significant improvements to the resolver since we had this, and this is no longer a concern. If we see users hitting this in the future, I think it'd be useful to look at this again with the details of the situation from an actual user hitting this.