Issues pip-installing pywin32

[Chris Angelico]

(Before I begin, I want to make it clear that I can still go poke
around on SourceForge and grab the appropriate installer [1], and that
does work. But if I'm going to tell someone else how to set up this
program, I'd much rather be able to recommend pip.)

On a fresh Python 3.4 running on Windows 7, attempting to "pip install
pywin32" doesn't work:

C:\Users\Rosuav>pip install pywin32
Downloading/unpacking pywin32
  Could not find any downloads that satisfy the requirement pywin32
  Some externally hosted files were ignored (use --allow-external
pywin32 to allow).
Cleaning up...
No distributions at all found for pywin32
Storing debug log for failure in C:\Users\Rosuav\pip\pip.log

C:\Users\Rosuav>pip install --allow-external pywin32
You must give at least one requirement to install (see "pip help install")


Okay, so the obvious command doesn't work, and gives a
not-particularly-helpful error message, but I know how to Google, I
can get past this.


C:\Users\Rosuav>pip install --allow-external pywin32
--allow-unverified pywin32 pywin32
Downloading/unpacking pywin32
  Could not find any downloads that satisfy the requirement pywin32
Cleaning up...
No distributions at all found for pywin32
Storing debug log for failure in C:\Users\Rosuav\pip\pip.log


Huh. The PyPI categorization seems to exclude Python 3.4 support
(despite versions for both 3.4 and 3.5 existing on the sourceforge
page). Let's try that with 2.7, just to see what happens. (I could
alternatively backlevel to 3.3, I suppose.)

C:\Users\Rosuav>\python27\python -m pip --version
pip 1.5.6 from C:\python27\lib\site-packages (python 2.7)

C:\Users\Rosuav>\python27\python -m pip install --allow-external
pywin32 --allow-unverified pywin32 pywin32
Downloading/unpacking pywin32
  Could not find any downloads that satisfy the requirement pywin32
Cleaning up...
No distributions at all found for pywin32
Storing debug log for failure in C:\Users\Rosuav\pip\pip.log


The log contains these lines, which may be a clue as to what's going on...

  Could not fetch URL
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/files/pywin32/ (from
https://pypi.python.org/simple/pywin32/): connection error: hostname
'sourceforge.net' doesn't match either of 'cloudfront.net',
'*.cloudfront.net'
  Will skip URL
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/files/pywin32/ when looking
for download links for pywin32
  Could not find any downloads that satisfy the requirement pywin32

Does this mean there's an HTTPS configuration error at sourceforge?
And if that is indeed the problem, is there any way that I, as an end
user, can bypass the check? My alternative is using a non-SSL link, so
it's not like I'd actually have worse security.

At this point, I am REALLY glad my Dad asked me to set this all up for
him, rather than just giving him some instructions and saying "go for
it". (And to think, all I want is a simple program to bounce some info
out from a Windows VM onto the Linux host. So much hassle for
something so simple.)

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/files/pywin32/