April 26, 2022
Mind-boggling, I know, but having never actually run into this before I thought you could at least force the uninstallation process through pip somehow, but it turns out that you can’t:
$ cat pip_uninstall.txt | xargs -I {} pip uninstall -y {}
Found existing installation: azure-keyvault 4.0.0
Not uninstalling azure-keyvault at /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages, outside environment /usr
Can't uninstall 'azure-keyvault'. No files were found to uninstall.
Found existing installation: azure-common 1.1.24
Not uninstalling azure-common at /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages, outside environment /usr
Can't uninstall 'azure-common'. No files were found to uninstall.
...This is the case both under the root user or any other user who can leverage sudo to try and perform the uninstallation. The only way seems to be to go and muck around in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages with rm -rf, but even if I know exactly what I need to uninstall, then doing that just seems like a recipe for disaster.