Why am I receiving protobuff errors when using pip to install packages?

Question

I understand that protobuf is a binary serialization format from Google meant to serialize structured data. Why am i receiving protobuff errors like below when for example i am trying to install the aquests package using pip?

Error:

"tensorflow 1.7.0 has requirement protobuf>=3.4.0, but you'll have protobuf 3.1.0.post1 which is incompatible."

Answer 1

Because protobuf is a Python package that implements said protocol, and tensorflow requires later version than you already have. Run pip install -U tensorflow instead of pip install tensorflow or at least pip install -U 'protobuf>=3.4.0'.