Pip install not functioning on windows 7 Cygwin install

Question

I'm having a terrible time of getting pip up and running on Cygwin which I just recently installed on my Windows 7 Computer. I am writing in the hope that anyone out there can tell me what I am doing incorrectly in terms of getting these packages installed correctly.

To start, I followed the instructions on this site:

http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/installing.html

with setuptools installed prior to pip installation. I followed the steps, ran this command:

Ryan@Albert ~
$ python get-pip.py

got this output:

Downloading/unpacking pip
Downloading pip-1.5.tar.gz (898kB): 898kB downloaded
  Running setup.py egg_info for package pip

    warning: no files found matching 'pip/cacert.pem'
    warning: no files found matching '*.html' under directory 'docs'
    warning: no previously-included files matching '*.rst' found under direct
    no previously-included directories found matching 'docs/_build/_sources'
Installing collected packages: pip
  Running setup.py install for pip

    warning: no files found matching 'pip/cacert.pem'
    warning: no files found matching '*.html' under directory 'docs'
    warning: no previously-included files matching '*.rst' found under direct
    no previously-included directories found matching 'docs/_build/_sources'
    Installing pip script to /usr/bin
    Installing pip2.7 script to /usr/bin
    Installing pip2 script to /usr/bin
Successfully installed pip
Cleaning up...

and lo and behold, ran pip with this command:

Ryan@Albert ~
$ pip install --upgrade setuptools

which led to absolutely no output. A blank line appeared underneath for 3-4 seconds and then the input prompt came up again without pip actually doing anything. I did a bunch more testing to confirm that there was something called pip on my machine but anytime it ran, it essentially did nothing. It did not download or install any programs.

I went about trying to install pip another way after uninstalling the first version. This time I tried:

$ easy_install pip

And got the following output:

Searching for pip
Best match: pip 1.5
Adding pip 1.5 to easy-install.pth file
Installing pip script to /usr/bin
Installing pip2.7 script to /usr/bin
Installing pip2 script to /usr/bin

Using /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages
Processing dependencies for pip
Finished processing dependencies for pip

Again, tried using pip to install virtualenv using this command:

$ pip install virtualenv

and it paused for 3-4 seconds, then made the command prompt available again. Exactly like the previous time. When I checked to see whether virtualenv was installed, it was not.

Essentially I have tried and tried to get pip up and running on my windows 7 Cygwin install but to no avail. I am aware of the fact that I can use other packages to install plugins and so forth but I would really appreciate it if someone had any knowledge on why this was happening so it doesn't plague me when I try to install stuff further on down the line.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

There's a bug(?) in 64-bit Cygwin which causes ctypes.util to segfault when trying to find libuuid (/usr/bin/cyguuid-1.dll). The fix is to install libuuid-devel from Cygwin setup. I found this from an issue filed against requests.py, but it's noted (and worked around in different ways) in a few other places, too.

Answer 2

Came across the same problem. Installation of binutils cygwin package solved it for me.