CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonubuntupipdebian
IngoMeyer
IngoMeyer

Reputation: 463

Why does `pip list` not show all Python packages installed by `apt` on Debian / Ubuntu?

On Debian based Linux distributions pip usually detects Python packages installed by apt (in /usr/lib/pythonX/dist-packages). However, this is not valid for PyQt5 for example (PyQt5 does not show up when running pip list or pip freeze). Does anyone know why?

With Docker you can run the following steps to reproduce the problem:

Upvotes: 2

Views: 7961

Answers (2)

Eddy Pronk
Eddy Pronk

Reputation: 6705

First, look what files are installed by the package:

dpkg-query -L python3-requests

In the output you will see:

/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/requests-2.18.4.egg-info/PKG-INFO

This file starts with:

Metadata-Version: 1.1
Name: requests
Version: 2.18.4

The python3-pyqt5 package does not contain such file.

I can imagine, that some of the Debian packages do and others don't include this metadata.

The Debian FAQ states: (https://wiki.debian.org/Python/FAQ)

We don't want to provide ".egg" files within the .deb. However we want to make the "egg meta-information" available so that users can use eggs if they so wish. Python >= 2.5 does that by default in distutils. For setuptools based setup.py you need to pass the option "--single-version-externally-managed" to the "setup.py install" call.

Upvotes: 2

jar
jar

Reputation: 2908

It is indeed true that PyQt5 doesn't show up in the pip list output. Instead pycairo and PyGObject would show up.
If you execute python3 and then run import PyQt5 it imports without any errors. I have checked it on a docker container with a base image of Ubuntu, however it should work the same for Debian.

root@d6b7f119b352:/# python3
Python 3.6.7rc1 (default, Sep 27 2018, 09:51:25)
[GCC 8.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import PyQt5
>>>

Or

>>> from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication, QWidget, QLabel
>>>

Upvotes: 0

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