Error: cannot uninstall package occurs on installing a package a second time

[mweislley]

I'm working on upgrading my project to use uv and ran into this error when I installed the requirements.txt file a second time. I've narrowed it down to exactly a particular dependency that gives the error.

Reproduction steps

vscode ➜ /workspaces $ uv venv -p 3.12.3 test-venv
Using Python 3.12.3
Creating virtualenv at: test-venv
Activate with: source test-venv/bin/activate
vscode ➜ /workspaces $ source test-venv/bin/activate
(test-venv) vscode ➜ /workspaces $ uv pip install suds-community==0.8.5
Resolved 1 package in 99ms
Prepared 1 package in 65ms
Installed 1 package in 2ms
 + suds-community==0.8.5
(test-venv) vscode ➜ /workspaces $ uv pip install suds-community==0.8.5
Resolved 1 package in 1ms
error: Cannot uninstall package; `top_level.txt` file not found at: test-venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/suds_community.egg-info/top_level.txt

Expected
Don't throw an error when installing a package that was already installed properly

I've included a more detailed output with RUST_LOG=TRACE and -v
reinstall.log

[charliermarsh]

I'll take a look, thanks.

[charliermarsh]

The structure of the wheel is slightly problematic... It seems to include a directory at the top-level that shouldn't be there. I'd recommend upgrading the version honestly, but we can also make uv robust to this.

[charliermarsh]

Another way to explain it is that because there are two separate suds_community directories here, it appears to uv as if the package were installed twice:

❯ ls -l .venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/
total 24
drwxr-xr-x@  3 crmarsh  staff    96 Aug 30 10:30 __pycache__
-rw-r--r--   1 crmarsh  staff    18 Aug 30 10:30 _virtualenv.pth
-rw-r--r--   1 crmarsh  staff  4378 Aug 30 10:30 _virtualenv.py
drwxr-xr-x   9 crmarsh  staff   288 Aug 30 10:31 pip
drwxr-xr-x  11 crmarsh  staff   352 Aug 30 10:30 pip-24.2.dist-info
drwxr-xr-x  28 crmarsh  staff   896 Aug 30 10:31 suds
drwxr-xr-x   9 crmarsh  staff   288 Aug 30 10:31 suds_community-0.8.5.dist-info
drwxr-xr-x   6 crmarsh  staff   192 Aug 30 10:31 suds_community.egg-info

[mweislley]

Thank you!
Yes, I did notice the latest version of that package doesn't have this issues (1.2.0) and I'm attempting to upgrade it but the dependency that uses it ALSO has a patch it applies to suds-community so it's becoming complicated. If uv would handle this, that would make my life easier.

[charliermarsh]

Yeah totally understand -- I generally don't like "upgrade it" as a solution for users (sometimes there's no choice). I think we can be more graceful here but you might be shown a warning or something when we reinstall (rather than failing).