Installing simplejson kills pip on anaconda

[scjody]

@theengineear, from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28751216/plotly-killed-my-python-install?nah=1#28754036

Python 3.4 on Windows via Anaconda 2.1.0: installing simplejson (which is pulled in by Plotly's requirements.txt) kills pip:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Anaconda3\Scripts\pip-script.py", line 3, in <module>
    from pip import main
  File "C:\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pip\__init__.py", line 11, in <module>
    from pip.vcs import git, mercurial, subversion, bazaar  # noqa
  File "C:\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pip\vcs\mercurial.py", line 9, in <module>
    from pip.download import path_to_url
  File "C:\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pip\download.py", line 22, in <module>
    from pip._vendor import requests, six
  File "C:\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pip\_vendor\requests\__init__.py", line 58, in <module>
    from . import utils
  File "C:\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pip\_vendor\requests\utils.py", line 25, in <module>
    from .compat import parse_http_list as _parse_list_header
  File "C:\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pip\_vendor\requests\compat.py", line 77, in <module>
    import simplejson as json
  File "C:\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\simplejson\__init__.py", line 112, in <module>
    from .scanner import JSONDecodeError
  File "C:\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\simplejson\scanner.py", line 10, in <module>
    c_make_scanner = _import_c_make_scanner()
  File "C:\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\simplejson\scanner.py", line 6, in _import_c_make_scanner
    from simplejson._speedups import make_scanner
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0x83 in position 4: invalid start byte

Can we not install simplejson unless it's really needed (Python 2.6 systems)? Or is there another way we can work around this Anaconda issue? (Logged for Anaconda as: ContinuumIO/anaconda-issues#238 )

[theengineear]

Ah, bummer. Yeah, we wanted to unify the install process. Do you know of a way to have pip optionally install something depending on the python version?

[theengineear]

@scjody , I think a good non-hacky workaround is to allow installing like this:

pip install plolty[PY2.6]

http://pythonhosted.org/setuptools/setuptools.html#declaring-extras-optional-features-with-their-own-dependencies

Then, we can just check and shoot out a warning explaining that.

[scjody]

Great idea!