Meson install error: Can't get attribute 'OctalInt'

[doniaalwin]

Observed the following error on meson install of gstreamer :

File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/mesonbuild/minstall.py", line 330, in do_install
    d = pickle.load(ifile)
AttributeError: Can't get attribute 'OctalInt' on <module 'mesonbuild.coredata' from '/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/mesonbuild/coredata.py'>

[eli-schwartz]

I'm sure we don't need a page title that long.

[eli-schwartz]

question: what command did you run exactly in order to get this error?

And, where did you get meson from? pip, or your distro's package manager?

[doniaalwin]

question: what command did you run exactly in order to get this error?

sudo ninja install

And, where did you get meson from? pip, or your distro's package manager?

pip

[doniaalwin]

Description : Build is successful but install failed

[eli-schwartz]

If you got it from pip, why is it using /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/mesonbuild/minstall.py

In order to use sudo ninja install, meson must be installed as root. Your installation attempt is incorrectly picking up the wrong (outdated!) version of meson.

[doniaalwin]

Thank u removes all meson installations and reinstalled . It worked. Thank you

…

On Thu, 25 Feb 2021, 21:41 Eli Schwartz, ***@***.***> wrote: If you got it from pip, why is it using /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/mesonbuild/minstall.py In order to use sudo ninja install, meson must be installed as root. Your installation attempt is incorrectly picking up the wrong (outdated!) version of meson. — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#8425 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AIKLK3YFQ3JMDT53RNTGNNDTA4C5ZANCNFSM4YHSVQWA> .

[voland62]

Is it so hard to mention this in the docs?

[paulnegz]

Thank u removes all meson installations and reinstalled . It worked. Thank you
…
On Thu, 25 Feb 2021, 21:41 Eli Schwartz, @.***> wrote: If you got it from pip, why is it using /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/mesonbuild/minstall.py In order to use sudo ninja install, meson must be installed as root. Your installation attempt is incorrectly picking up the wrong (outdated!) version of meson. — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#8425 (comment)>, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AIKLK3YFQ3JMDT53RNTGNNDTA4C5ZANCNFSM4YHSVQWA .

Thank u removes all meson installations and reinstalled . It worked. Thank you
…
On Thu, 25 Feb 2021, 21:41 Eli Schwartz, @.***> wrote: If you got it from pip, why is it using /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/mesonbuild/minstall.py In order to use sudo ninja install, meson must be installed as root. Your installation attempt is incorrectly picking up the wrong (outdated!) version of meson. — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#8425 (comment)>, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AIKLK3YFQ3JMDT53RNTGNNDTA4C5ZANCNFSM4YHSVQWA .

How did you uninstall and reinstall meson?

[eli-schwartz]

https://mesonbuild.com/Getting-meson.html#installing-meson-with-pip

Specifically mentions you must install meson using sudo pip if you intend to run sudo ninja install.

A better solution would be to upgrade from years-old versions of Ubuntu, but if you're using CI then sudo pip is a reasonable way to install things, and if you're using DESTDIR= installs then you don't need sudo ninja.

[mwilck]

In case someone else ends up here looking for the cause of this issue: It's related to #8282. It happens if an older version meson (lacking the commit from #8282) tries to load an install.dat file that had been generated by a more recent version of meson, which included that commit. I suppose it could also happen if an install.dat file was shipped e.g. in a tarball.

[xclaesse]

Made a PR to at least print a sensible error message, just like we do in all other subcommands that load coredata: #9507.

Specifically mentions you must install meson using sudo pip if you intend to run sudo ninja install.

I think sudo ninja install usually works when you have meson intsalled in your user's HOME, because we set the full path to the meson executable in build.ninja. However you can have the issue when doing sudo meson install because that will pick the meson executable for the root user, often from distro.

Note that on Linux you can even simply do meson install without sudo and it will uses polkit to elevate priviledge and that's going to use meson executable from your user instead of root/system version.

[eli-schwartz]

What??? No!

It can't possibly work, because the full path to the meson executable does absolutely nothing whatsoever, this is python and the code is all in modules imported off of sys.path.

sys.path is different when running as root, it doesn't matter what command you ran to get there nor whether polkit or ninja invoked meson. It won't inject the user site-packages into the root process, for obvious security reasons.

[xclaesse]

It can't possibly work,

It does on my laptop at least, doing that literally every day.

[xclaesse]

@eli-schwartz it works because meson.py mess up with sys.path to find modules in mesonbuild/ folder next to it.

[eli-schwartz]

On your laptop running sudo ~/.local/bin/meson imports code from ~/.local/lib/python 3.9/site-packages/mesonbuild/?

How exactly have you tested this?

[xclaesse]

oh, ok, it's not pip installed, it's running from git checkout. That's the difference, ok.

[eli-schwartz]

Right, no one for a second ever was talking about running path/to/git/checkout/meson.py

In fact running meson.py from a git checkout is one of the methods I recommended in the past to circumvent this, rather than using pip install.

As you said:

when you have meson intsalled in your user's HOME

Installed means not running from a git checkout.

[xclaesse]

yeah, sorry for the confusion :)

[xclaesse]

We could make it work when using polkit thought, by setting PYTHONPATH when running pkexec.

[eli-schwartz]

• the polkit codepath is evil, counterintuitive, and should be removed
• Regardless, I see no reason to modify the global import path, adding far more than just mesonbuild to it, when elevating to root. For something that isn't even a real issue, but rather a broken setup.

People can just run from a git checkout or use a zipapp.