After upgrading some things using homebrew, this error started coming up on a coworker’s machine when he tried to pip install virtualenvwrapper.
This error was coming up right before the operation not permitted:
Installing collected packages: six
Found existing installation: six 1.4.1
DEPRECATION: Uninstalling a distutils installed project (six) has been deprecated and will be removed in a future version. This is due to the fact that uninstalling a distutils project will only partially uninstall the project.
Uninstalling six-1.4.1:
The solution we found was to ignore the installed six version:
pip install virtualenvwrapper --upgrade --ignore-installed six
I’m not sure how, but this did the trick. I learned about the --ignore-installed option here.
https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3165