Yes. Another one.

Let’s have another (little) Python packaging rant. It’s been a while.

I just made a mistake. I thought I had told my deployment software to remove a Python installation, when I had actually only removed one third-party package that I had repackaged as MSI. Then I deleted the whole installation directory (which I believed had only leftover bits).

Oops. How do I clean this up?

Well, let’s just install the whole thing again, from the original – shudder – burn bundle.

Won’t work. Takes but a second, then claims success. No wonder, all the metadata is still there; for the bundle it looks like all its little constituent parts are already installed.

So we uninstall the bundle? Error 1603.

So we repair it? Gets up to pip (having done nothing to the actual file system), then fails, “no installation detected”. You don’t say.

Fix? Download the whole set of MSIs, install them in an order that works, uninstall them in reverse order, then install the bundle and uninstall it again.

Ceterum censeo: This mess would have been avoided had I thought before typing. OTOH, it also would have been avoided by using MSI as the distribution package format because then a repair installation would have actually worked.