I HATE PYTHON

There's also the "INSTALLER" metadata file, which can (should) be used to record what installed a given python package. I think Fedora-likes and Debian-likes also install python packages from their repositories into one path (/usr/lib) and configure pip to install into another (/var/lib) and put both in the Python search path. You can still break utilities by installing system-wide, but it's much easier to get the distro-provided tools working again by just nuking the system-wide pip install.