Why does pip freeze geneate package_name=0.0.0 - pip

Question

I used pip freeze to pull out every dependency of my virtualenv to use this environment in other place so that I got the requirements.txt like the below.
certifi==2017.7.27.1
chardet==3.0.4
get==0.0.0
gevent==1.2.2
greenlet==0.4.12
idna==2.6
numpy==1.13.3
pandas==0.20.3
post==0.0.0
psycopg2==2.7.3.1
public==0.0.0
python-dateutil==2.6.1
pytz==2017.2
query-string==0.0.0
request==0.0.0
requests==2.18.4
setupfiles==0.0.50
six==1.11.0
sqlalchemy==1.1.14
urllib3==1.22
I used this requirements in other computer but whenever I tried running pip install -r requirements.txt I got the error like the following.
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
Requirement already satisfied: certifi==2017.7.27.1 in d:\workspace\juice-project\venv\lib\site-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 1))
Requirement already satisfied: chardet==3.0.4 in d:\workspace\juice-project\venv\lib\site-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 2))
Collecting get==0.0.0 (from -r requirements.txt (line 3))
Using cached get-0.0.0.tar.gz
Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
File "d:\workspace\juice-project\venv\lib\tokenize.py", line 452, in open
buffer = _builtin_open(filename, 'rb')
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'C:\\Users\\verys\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\pip-build-1cd8yl0b\\get\\setup.py'
----------------------------------------
Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in C:\Users\verys\AppData\Local\Temp\pip-build-1cd8yl0b\get\
I thought it is caused by privilege of window user so that I spent a lots of time to solve this problem with other reason. I got so annoyed because of the bug. Could you explain why this unused things generate and why this error can be like this?

Answer 1

Because these libraries — get, request (of the same author) — are written improperly. It is not your problem, it is theirs. You are NOT able to solve this from your side.
Take a look at their setup.py:
kwargs = dict()
# known-issues:
# pip running `python setup.py egg_info` before installation:
# 1) pip checks metadata name pip/req/req_install.py:run_egg_info()
# 2) pip attempts to discover all of the dependencies before installation
name = os.path.basename(os.getcwd()).split(".")[0].lower()
path = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), "requirements.txt")
if os.path.exists(path) and os.path.isfile(path):
kwargs["install_requires"] = open(path).read().splitlines()
setup(name=name, **kwargs)
It does not contain version=... kwarg. Sadly so, this library will be always of version 0.0.0, which is the default of this setupfiles self-made library (see here).
PS: Do you really want to use a library of that quality? Why not just copy thise few lines to your code? This is not nodejs world, where it is good to use nano-modules like this.
UPD: I've just noticed that setup() is not from setuptools, but from setupfiles, also of the same author, and it is declared to guess the values of the keys. So, maybe it was supposed to work. But is broken because of this non-standard usage of the setup conventions.
I wouldn't say it is a best or even good practice to replace setuptools this way. And it is not safe either — the malicious library authors can just inject any arbitrary code to be executed on your workstations/servers. Especially that hacky.
Still, in the example it requires a version=... argument, which is missing in those libraries.