Python Forum

1. ubuntu has included many pypi packages in order to resolve dependencies of some non-pypi packages in its repository without running pip.

2. pypi packages come in 2 formats (egg and distutils). the ones in distutils format do not include a file that lists the files in the package. see #4

3. pip did not extract a list of files at the time it installed them in order to generate a true list of files. so those in distutils format had no record of installed files once the installation was complete. pip cannot uninstall these packages.

4. there is a list of files for distutils packages that pip apparently does not know about or know how to find. see the output of the find /usr -print|fgrep dist-info/RECORD command. these files are CSV format with field 1 being a path relative to the installation target, which is the parent directory of the package-version.dist-info subdirectory.

i have manged to clear out enough related packages and newly install the latest version from a common source (pypi) enough to get my cloud backs to apparently work. i was able to fully list everything in my backup (800000+ files) and a new backup increment is running now (originally it would crash on a module not found error or a syntax error very early before anything went over the network). i will later try to recover a few select files. if the recover test also works then i will happily be camping.