Warning: cannot find svn location for distribute==0.6.16dev-r0

Question

I am getting the following error with that command:

$pip freeze > requirements.txt 
Warning: cannot find svn location for distribute==0.6.16dev-r0

This is my requirements.txt file beforehand:

Django==1.3
django-registration==0.7

Answer 1

First, I'd note that is not an error, but rather a warning (though it is a serious one).

This appears to be an open issue in pip, judging by this issue page on the github repository. The problem arises when pip is installing something a development version that is held on a repository that is not SVN. One example that issue page provides:

mkvirtualenv test --no-site-packages
workon test
pip install flask==dev
pip freeze > requirements.txt

It will print this result to standard error:

Warning: cannot find svn location for Flask==0.9-devdev-20120114

But the file will still have:

## FIXME: could not find svn URL in dependency_links for this package:
Flask==0.9-devdev-20120114
Jinja2==2.6
Werkzeug==0.8.2
wsgiref==0.1.2

However, I won't be able to use this file in the future to install Flask. See here:

mkvirtualenv test2 --no-site-packages
workon test2
pip install -r requirements.txt

Will output the error:

Downloading/unpacking Flask==0.9-devdev-20120114 (from -r requirements.txt (line 2))
Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement Flask==0.9-devdev-20120114 (from -r requirements.txt (line 2)) (from versions: )
No distributions matching the version for Flask==0.9-devdev-20120114 (from -r requirements.txt (line 2))
Storing complete log in /Users/dgrtwo/.pip/pip.log

Answer 2

sudo pip install --upgrade distribute

Answer 3

Don't have enough rep to comment, but sudo pip install --upgrade distribute borked my pip installation. Pip version 1.4.1. After running that command, pip freeze gives an AssertionError.

The fix for THAT is sudo pip install setuptools==7.0

The two solutions combined fixed the svn URL warning.

Answer 4

I encountered the same problem trying to create a django project and deploy it on heroku. I think the problem was related to having multiple copies of django. Deleting django located at

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/django

and the reinstalling seemed to solve the problem. I was able to create the requirements.txt without a warning.