Inconsistency in Python library names

It is well known (or perhaps not) that some Python packages have seemingly inconsistent names. Keeping this in mind might save you a lot of unnecessary debugging headaches.

For example, the package multiprocessing can speed up certain tasks by parallelism. It is imported as follows.

import multiprocessing

Meanwhile, a nonsensical error would occur if you try to use pip install multiprocessing for actually installing said package. It turns out the installation should be:

pip install multiprocess

Such inconsistency in Python package naming is not uncommon, as discussed in this Stack Overflow question (link). The short answer is: multiprocessing is the Python package/module name (which we usually use), while multiprocess is how the package manager, pip in this case, likes to call it.