> I'm entirely mystified how people can get pip to work for anything that isn't either quite simple or is a shrink-wrapped product with carefully, and manually,

> I'm entirely mystified how people can get pip to work for anything that isn't either quite simple or is a shrink-wrapped product with carefully, and manually, selected versions of every component. That might be down to which sorts of packages you're using. By far most projects I work on pip does entirely fine without manually specifying versions. I have rarely ran into version conflicts and when I have it's usually resolved by pinning a single package version. The thing where I really see people trip with pip is when a package requires compiling a C module. Pip somewhat silently assumes you've got a working C compiler and all header files for the package. The error messages here are confusing and unhelpful for most python programmers. The whole push towards universal wheels is alleviating this problem but the current state of things is suboptimal. Add to that the whole confusing state of creating python packages in general and you get a nice mix of dysfunctional packages and packages that'd work with the right headers. None of this is really pips fault and anaconda doesn't fix all of these issues either. In my experience pip is mostly just harder to get started with but is afterwards a much better solution simply because pip doesn't hide anything from you which is a great boon when debugging packaging issues.