RTD build issue via ipython dependency

General
1

I’m wondering if anybody else in the Jupyter/IPython community that manages a readthedocs (RTD) deployment has seen an issue like this. I’m getting this build error:

Cannot uninstall 'ptyprocess'. It is a distutils installed project and thus we cannot accurately determine which files belong to it which would lead to only a partial uninstall.

This is an error from pip >= 10, which is pulling in ptyprocess via the following dependency:

Collecting ptyprocess>=0.5 (from pexpect; sys_platform != "win32"->ipython>=4.0.0; python_version >= "3.3"->ipywidgets>=7.0.0-> [ my project ])

Any suggestions? Is the issue with my package, one of the Jupyter packages, or with RTD? I don’t have any experience resolving this kind of issue, and cannot reproduce it locally either.

2

I have seen that locally on conda-installed packages, that I try to upgrade with pip I believe. It’s usually local, so I just rm -rf manually the offender.

3

Thanks! The issue is indeed from trying to combine using conda and pip. While I don’t think I can stop combining these, at least now I know which things to tweak :smiley:

1 Like
4

The conda package should include setuptools metadata, but it doesn’t. See https://github.com/conda-forge/ptyprocess-feedstock/pull/15 for what should be a fix.

I think a workaround would be to pip install --ignore-installed ptyprocess to clobber the ptyprocess installed by conda with one with proper metadata.

5

Yes, there are several packages that should include the setuptools metadata (including certifi and docutils). More downstream, I reported this issue to RTD: https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/issues/5545 It was caused by a recent change for RTD to always use the flag --force-install with pip install, which exacerbated this issue.

6

Yeah, any time you find a package where that’s happening, feel fee to open an Issue (or PR!) on the conda-forge feedstock. Zero Python packages should be installed without setuptools metadata, even with conda.