AttributeError: module 'site' has no attribute 'getsitepackages' when running p4a create

[MelvIsntNormal]

Hopefully this is just me doing something wrong.

I created a test project to test building an APK using Python 3.5. I'm running this comand:

p4a create \
        --dist_name=testproject \
        --bootstrap=sdl2 \
        --requirements=sdl2,python3crystax,kivy \
        --android_api=19 \
        --ndk_dir=/home/melvisntnormal/.android/ndk_crystax/

which gives me the above error. Any way to get this working?

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[inclement]

This might be because of the current slightly hacking hostpython3 usage (i..e. trying to run python3.5 from the system). Does your python3.5 installation let you run site.getsitepackages()?

[MelvIsntNormal]

Nope. Attempting to run it in the terminal gives the same error:

(kivy-3.5) melvisntnormal@msowah-e5440 ~/Projects/Android/3_5_test $ python
Python 3.5.1 (default, Dec 18 2015, 00:00:00) 
[GCC 4.8.4] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import site
>>> site.getsitepackages()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: module 'site' has no attribute 'getsitepackages'

[inclement]

Okay, interesting, this is not a scenario I had considered and I'm not sure what property of the installation causes this problem. Is it in a virtualenv?

[MelvIsntNormal]

Yeah this is a virtualenv. I've installed Kivy, P4A, and its dependencies on it

[inclement]

I think this is probably caused by this known issue in virtualenv (though I'm not certain). Possible workarounds for now include:

• install and use python3.5 outside a virtualenv
• modify python-for-android to use a different method for finding the site packages dir
• copy a working site.py into the local directory (not sure if this will work)

I appreciate that none of these are ideal, and I'll look at fixing this sooner rather than later (hopefully with an ideal method, using a locally built python), but that's probably the status for now.

[MelvIsntNormal]

Hmmm. I haven't really had a very comfortable experience with building for android outside a virtualenv to be honest. What is the method used for? Is it just finding a list of the directories of installed packages?

[inclement]

It's used here to get the site-packages dir so that we can add it to our modified PYTHONPATH when building modules for android.

I appreciate that this isn't ideal, and intend to fix this by building a local hostpython3 as is done with python2. The current state is a convenient workaround to use the local system python instead.

[MelvIsntNormal]

All right, I guess I'll wait for an actual fix. In the meantime, I've used a probably naive solution and changed "\\n".join(site.getsitepackages()) to os.path.dirname(site.__file__) + "/site-packages", and it works just fine (though the apk crashes on my phone, but so did the python2.7 and Kivy Launcher versions). Is there any reason why using os.path.dirname(site.__file__) + "/site-packages" is a bad idea?

[inclement]

That seems like an adequate solution for now.

For the crashing on the phone, there's a bug right now that seems to cause compilation for the wrong architecture, but this doesn't affect everyone and I haven't pinned down the reason yet. It might also be something else.

[MelvIsntNormal]

OK then, I'll use that until an official fix is released. The crashing issue seemed to have something to do with an empty _event.so file. I'll open a separate issue once I get some more information.

[kasaiee]

@MelvIsntNormal Hi, I had exactly this error in django. I solved issue by opening manage.py and add this code to first line of it.
#!/usr/bin/python3.5 python

[AndreMiras]

@inclement should we use one of the workaround as a fallback method?
Like the one suggested in the upstream ticket pypa/virtualenv#355 (comment)
We can try/catch and do the workaround on AttributeError. If you're interested I can work on the pull request.

[inclement]

Closing as stale, since it should be resolved by moving away from crystax and having a proper hostpython again for our own use.