[haldean]

pip's lack of backtracking is doubly irritating, because it installs packages as it goes. It would be great if it would fetch all of the required manifests and make sure that the install was going to succeed before it starts spewing stuff everywhere, but instead it will happily back itself into a corner where A->B->C(v1) and A->D->C(v2) conflict and so it leaves the system with A, B and C(v1) installed and prints a nice red stack trace.

[nilliams]

Yep it's maddening. We use pip-compile [1] at work and check-in the then totally-resolved requirements.txt. That is working for us well. However I still head-desk every time I just want to install a local package (with pip install -e) to work on it and pip runs amok, naïvely downgrading/upgrading/doing-whatever-it-pleases :/

[1] https://github.com/nvie/pip-tools

[crdoconnor]

This, along with the inability to intelligently detect a lack of necessary system package dependencies (e.g. libcurses/libpq-dev) is the most irritating part of pip.