Change in cache tag in Python 3.8 - pip confused

[Paul Moore]

On Tue, 7 May 2019 at 21:53, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've been building Python 3.8 pre-alphas and alphas for a while now,
> and ran into a weird problem. Not sure if this is significant or not,
> and hoping to get other people's views.
>
> It seems that the value of sys.implementation.cache_tag changed from
> "cpython-38m" to just "cpython-38" at some point. That means that a
> statement like "import lzo" will no longer find a file called
> "lzo.cpython-38m-x86_64-linux-gnu.so", which I had had prior to the
> change. The trouble is, pip *did* recognize that file, and said that
> the python-lzo package was still installed.
>
> Solution: "pip uninstall python-lzo" and then reinstall it. Now it's
> created "lzo.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so" and all is well.
>
> Does anyone else know about how pip detects existing files, and
> whether it could be brought more in sync with the import machinery?

I don't know if this is what you were after, but pip decides if a
project FOO is installed by looking for the FOO-X.Y.Z.dist-info
directory in site-packages. The RECORD file in that directory contains
a list of all files installed when the package was originally
installed (that's what pip uses to decide what to uninstall).

Paul