ImportError: Cannot import the name of the ProtocolError

Question

I recently had difficulty using pip, and anytime I tried to issue the pip command, I got the following error message.

File "/usr/bin/pip", line 9, in <module>
    load_entry_point('pip==1.5', 'console_scripts', 'pip2.7')()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 353, in load_entry_point
    return get_distribution(dist).load_entry_point(group, name)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 2302, in load_entry_point
    return ep.load()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 2029, in load
    entry = __import__(self.module_name, globals(),globals(), ['__name__'])
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/__init__.py", line 11, in <module>
    from pip.vcs import git, mercurial, subversion, bazaar  # noqa
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/vcs/mercurial.py", line 9, in <module>
    from pip.download import path_to_url
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/download.py", line 22, in <module>
    from pip._vendor import requests
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/_vendor/requests/__init__.py", line 58, in <module>
    from . import utils
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/_vendor/requests/utils.py", line 25, in <module>
    from .compat import parse_http_list as _parse_list_header
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/_vendor/requests/compat.py", line 7, in <module>
    from .packages import charade as chardet
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/_vendor/requests/packages/__init__.py", line 3, in <module>
    from . import urllib3
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/_vendor/requests/packages/urllib3/__init__.py", line 16, in <module>
    from .connectionpool import (
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/_vendor/requests/packages/urllib3/connectionpool.py", line 33, in <module>
    from .connection import (
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/_vendor/requests/packages/urllib3/connection.py", line 41, in <module>
    from .util import (
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/_vendor/requests/packages/urllib3/util/__init__.py", line 18, in <module>
    from .retry import Retry
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/_vendor/requests/packages/urllib3/util/retry.py", line 4, in <module>
    from ..exceptions import (
ImportError: cannot import name ProtocolError

I am using openSUSE SLES 12.

Answer 1

So I struggled to find a solution to this error, because everything I was looking for didn’t help, until I finally came across an answer to another question related to Pipe that solved my error. How to fix 'ImportError: can't import IncompleteRead name'?

So, to get rid of this error message, run the following command.

easy_install -U pip