Installing some requirements taking too much time

Question

I'm trying to install some needed requirements with the following command:

pip3.8 install -r requirements.txt

That is the version of python I'm using. It was running smoothly until I added the line "spacy==3.2.0". Now it's taking a long time and I'm getting these messages:

INFO: This is taking longer than usual. You might need to provide the dependency resolver with stricter constraints to reduce runtime. See https://pip.pypa.io/warnings/backtracking for guidance. If you want to abort this run, press Ctrl + C.
INFO: pip is looking at multiple versions of openapi-spec-validator to determine which version is compatible with other requirements. This could take a while.
INFO: pip is looking at multiple versions of markupsafe to determine which version is compatible with other requirements. This could take a while.

The thing I don't get is that all requirements specify the version exactly so the message isn't being helpful.

I'm doing this in a VM running Ubuntu 22.04 if it matters.

Answer 1

There have been few versions of pip that had bugs that could result in behavior like this, due to downloading every version of dependencies ("looking at multiple versions of..." is a sign of this). You can see more details about a really bad one here. If that's your problem you should be able to fix it by running pip3.8 install -U pip to update pip (or doing whatever your distribution requires).