What you have to do:
Reinstall the python-pip
package with apt
and afterwards upgrade your pip
to the latest version with pip
itself or easy_install
if it is broken.
sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install --upgrade pip || sudo easy_install --upgrade pip
Why you should do that:
apt
only installs packages it finds in your installed repositories, but the python packages in the official repositories are incredibly outdated! However, some packages you might install in the future may list python-pip
as dependency and and require that package to be installed. They won't recognize it if you installed it without apt
. Also, the man
command does not work for pip
then as only apt
creates a manpage for it, easy_install
does not.
easy_install
and pip
however don't fetch their packages from any repository, but from PyPI (Python Package Index), which always holds the latest available versions.
So my suggestion is to use pip
instead of apt
to update python packages if you want current versions. easy_install
is the ancestor of pip
and should usually be avoided and replaced by pip
, but as long as it's broken, you have to use it. You could also do a sudo pip install --upgrade pip
to get the latest pip
version without easy_install
.
If you don't have the pip
package installed by apt
, then just do it additionally. I did not remove python-pip
with apt
before upgrading it with pip
or easy_install
and it also works. As apt
installs the old pip
version in /usr/bin
and pip
/easy_install
use the directory /usr/local/bin
, which has the higher priority, a plain call to pip
without giving an explicit directory always runs the newer version, if more than one is installed.