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When uninstalling a package installed using a bdist_wininst installer, the uninstall reports "XXX files and directories could not be removed". The problem appears to be the __pycache__ directories introduced in Python 3.2, which are not removed properly.

Thanks for the report. Are you familiar with the bdist_wininst code? I am not (yet), so if you could make a patch it would help a lot.
See also #11254 (which I will commit shortly).

Not really (tbh, not at all). If I get some spare time, I can have a
look at producing a patch, but I have little time available for coding
at the moment (and I'm switching constantly between 3 PCs, so never
have a working development environment when I need one :-() If I get
anything workable before you do, I'll post it here.

I don’t have a Windows VM set up yet, but I can try to write a patch in the coming weeks and ask you to test it. Deal?

On 9 October 2011 04:21, Éric Araujo <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
>
> Éric Araujo <merwok@netwok.org> added the comment:
>
> I don’t have a Windows VM set up yet, but I can try to write a patch in the coming weeks and ask you to test it. Deal?
No problem there!

Have you had a chance to look at this yet?

No, I worked on other things in my Python time. I did get a Windows image, but failed to configure the VM*. I’ve found some doc and will try again, or go back to the idea of giving you a patch to test.
 * (It gives a BSOD at boot, so one could argue that it counts as "working"
 for Windows :)

So I had a quick look at the code and found the lines in need of a fix. The problem comes as usual from our friend "path + optimize and 'o' or 'c'". I can read some C, so I tried to replace that with imp.cache_from_source, but a real C programmer should take it from here, especially if they find themselves on Windows so that they can recompile the wininst*.exe file and test the fix :)

I'll try to take a look over the next couple of days.

Just a gentle reminder.

I'm not sure how relevant this is any more, as pip is the preferred installer these days and it cleanly uninstalls projects. At least for my usage, I no longer use wininst installers at all. I won't close this myself, though, as the issue still exists. But I won't object if it is closed as "wontfix".

The distutils bdist_wininst command has been removed in Python 3.10: see bpo-42802.