Found Conflicts! This can take several minutes.

I just need to vent...

[NickMNS]

I'm trying to update my version of Python on my windows 7 box. Shortly after launching the update it threw the message:

Found Conflicts! Looking for incompatible packages.
This can take several minutes. Press CTRL-C to abort.

It's been hours....

And of course, I have to sleep at some point, so it will probably end once I go to bed then show a pop-up, and then time out. So I can start all over tomorrow.

[tangor]

Venting is good. Prevents the Van Gogh response.

[NickMNS]

I was wrong.

...it will probably end once I go to bed then show a pop-up,

I woke-up this morning to find....
It hasn't finished yet. "Several minutes" more like 12+ hours and going strong.

[lucy24]

Do you have any way to know if it is actually doing something all this time, as opposed to putting up the message and then hanging forever? Is there some kind of status bar, at least?

[NickMNS]

Do you have any way to know if it is actually doing something all this time,

Fortunately yes, it is going through each package and "Examining"* each one for conflicts with the new version, it shows progress on the current package and all the completed packages.

*It states "Examining conflicts for package ...", it would appear (and from what I remember the last time I did this a few years back) that there is another step after this where it tries to resolve the conflicts and if can't resolve the conflict it stops and the you need to manage it manually and then start the process over.

Fun times ahead.

I believe that the last time, I uninstalled the whole thing, and then reinstalled the new version from scratch.

Oh and I didn't really want to upgrade, I just wanted to install a new package, but there was a conflict and it seemed to require the new version of Python to work. It was time regardless, I was running 3.6 on this machine, the current version is 3.8 (Anaconda) or 3.9 for the basic Python, and I am using Anaconda.

[NickMNS]

More than 24 hours have elapsed I'm at 125/257 conflicts. At this rate it looks like it will complete tomorrow at this time.

[tangor]

Well? Did it complete? :) (26 hours later)

[NickMNS]

Well? Did it complete? :) (26 hours later)

Yes it did, more like 52 hours later. And the best part is, it printed out a long list of conflicts, so long that you can't scroll top of the list in the command prompt. Oh, and it didn't update.

What a waste, good thing that I don't depend on this box to do my work. Now I need to see if I can force the update to somehow ignore the conflicts, that or simply start over with an uninstall and re-install.

[NickMNS]

I'm living dangerously...
I just uninstalled all the packages I installed over the years, it took a few seconds.
Now I'm trying the update again. Fingers crossed! Hopefully it will be faster than "several minutes" (50+ hours).

[NickMNS]

The above didn't work. I finally uninstalled the whole lot, and then started with a fresh install and that worked. I'm now rolling with Anaconda Python 3.8.8. And I was able to install OpenCV without any issues, which was the whole point of the exercise.

Now I'm going to need to reinstall all the packages manually as I come across them. PITA, but serves me right for being lazy and not using dedictated env's.