upgade python version using pip

Question

So I have python 2.7.3 installed on Windows 7 64 bit and I want to do an incremental upgrade to version 2.7.5. I have pip installed and it works fine; I just installed Django using it.

I ran into this command: pip install --upgrade 'python>=2.7,<2.7.99'

Now it forces pip to download the latest version that is not Python 3 which is what I want. 2.7.5 starts downloading and I get the following error:

    Downloading/unpacking python>=2.7,<2.7.99
      Downloading Python-2.7.5.tar.bz2 (12.1MB): 12.1MB downloaded
      Running setup.py egg_info for package python
        Traceback (most recent call last):
          File "<string>", line 16, in <module>
          File "c:\users\name\appdata\local\temp\pip-build-name\python\setup.py", line 33, in <module>
            COMPILED_WITH_PYDEBUG = ('--with-pydebug' in sysconfig.get_config_var("CONFIG_ARGS"))
        TypeError: argument of type 'NoneType' is not iterable
        Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
        Traceback (most recent call last):

      File "<string>", line 16, in <module>

      File "c:\users\name\appdata\local\temp\pip-build-name\python\setup.py", line 33, in <module>

        COMPILED_WITH_PYDEBUG = ('--with-pydebug' in sysconfig.get_config_var("CONFIG_ARGS"))

    TypeError: argument of type 'NoneType' is not iterable

    ----------------------------------------
    Command python setup.py egg_info failed with error code 1 in c:\users\name\appdata\local\temp\pip-build-name\python

Also I am new to pip. When I cancel a download is that safe? I typed install "pip install python" and it started downloading version python version 3. So I cancelled. That won't override my main python 2.7.3 install?

Curious.

Answer 1

pip is designed to upgrade python packages and not to upgrade python itself. pip shouldn't try to upgrade python when you ask it to do so.

Don't type pip install python but use an installer instead.