"UnresolvableRequirements" or "Conflicting requirements" when installing or updating packages – Enthought Knowledge Base

In the Canopy Package Manager and in EDM, you might encounter an error such as "UnresolvableRequirements" or "Conflicting requirements" when installing or updating packages.

Such errors can occur in one of the following situations (if you doing "Update all", then several of these may apply):

1) The most common cause (for example if you are attempting to install or update packages cartopy, or iris, or docker, or netcdf4, or cftime, or cf_units) is that the desired package depends on another package or package version, which is located in a package repository that is not currently activated on your system. The package repositories most often needed here are enthought/lgpl and enthought/gpl (both of which are available to all users, but neither of which is activated by default, because some organizations restrict the use of LGPL- or GPL-licensed software.)

If you are using Canopy, you can activate any available repository in the Package Manager Settings. For instructions see "Package Manager Settings Pane" in the Canopy user documentation.
If you are using EDM at the command line, you can activate additional repositories by editing EDM's configuration file. See "Advanced Configuration", including "Examples", in the EDM user documentation.

2) Another cause, when you are attempting to update to pandas 0.24 or above, is a conflict with the catalyst package, used in the legacy Canopy Data Import Tool. If, as is very likely, you are not using the Data Import Tool, then you can safely uninstall catalyst. If you are using it, then you will not be able to update pandas.

3) If you are attempting to update the package qt to version 5 or above, or to install the package pyqt5, then you must first uninstall the pyside package, which requires qt version 4, and install pyqt5 as a replacement. (This will work well for most library packages, but if your own code is pyside-specific, then you will need to stay with qt 4 for now.)

4) The error can occur temporarily when we are in middle of updating a package (such as numpy) which is a dependency of very many other packages. In this case, the solution is to try again later.

5) If you installed Canopy from a full installer please note that updating and installing packages in a "full" environment is generally not recommended and not supported. See this article.

6) Sometimes a Python environment will become corrupted, whether because of software, network, or user errors. If this is the case, you can try the command "edm fix-broken", but it's usually safer / more robust to rebuild the environment fresh. In Canopy, with the default User environment, this can be done from the Tools menu's Troubleshoot sub-menu.

7) Very rarely, the error can occur due to a build error in one of our packages. If none of the above-mentioned scenarios applies to you, please report the problem to Enthought. For an error in EDM, send email to support@enthought.com, including the full console transcript from edm. For an error in the Canopy Package Manager, please file a report from the Canopy Help menu.

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