[ubuntu-dev] force pip to use python 2.7 and not python 3+

[jankeromnes]

This is terrible. Please suggest a better solution if you know one.

[jankeromnes]

By the way this is to fix Kresus builds, but the regression affects any other image that uses pip install while expecting Python 2.7.

[jankeromnes]

@bnjbvr Please have a look if you can. 😄

[bnjbvr]

This is quite unfortunate. It would be more verbose, but would make it sense to apply the strategy advised in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2812520/pip-dealing-with-multiple-python-versions ? i.e. use pip2 or pip3 whenever it's needed in place of pip.

[jankeromnes]

This is quite unfortunate.

I agree. 😕

i.e. use pip2 or pip3 whenever it's needed in place of pip.

This does seem like the ideal solution, however this only works if you control every call-site of pip. That's not the case for Janitor: Even if we could replace all references to pip with pip2 (e.g. in Kresus' install scripts), there will probably be other dependencies or software projects that will still use pip and expect it to be Python 2.7 (e.g. legacy software projects).

I read somewhere online that pip should use the same Python version as python. However, in current Janitor environments it seems that pip uses 3+ while python is 2.7. Thus I would like to fix pip to correctly reference 2.7 (as python does, because that's what legacy software will expect), and count on more modern software to explicitely use pip2 / pip3 and python2 / python3.

[Martiusweb]

what if you do that before pip install --upgrade pip?

[jankeromnes]

Actually I don't think this solves the problem (pip install --upgrade pip says Requirement already up-to-date: pip in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages and leaves /usr/local/bin/pip on Python 3.5).

[jankeromnes]

@bnjbvr @Martiusweb Thanks a lot for your input! However, it seems that we couldn't find cleaner solutions than the one I'm proposing, so I think we'll have to go ahead with the binary-overwrite fix for now. Any objections?

[jankeromnes]

ETIMEDOUT

Let's ship this as is.