pyinstaller build broken with ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'backports'

[pllim]

Hello. We have a pyinstaller test job downstream at astropy and it started failing about 4 days ago with ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'backports'. Did something change here that needs downstream adjustment? Thanks!

• TST: pyinstaller job broken with ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'backports' astropy/astropy#18982
• https://github.com/astropy/astropy/tree/main/.pyinstaller
• https://github.com/astropy/astropy/blob/5d0876b88128a5d34811b303a51c75b927daab17/tox.ini#L186

[bwoodsend]

Probably the altgraph 0.17.5 release from a few days ago, dropping its use of pkg_resources to load its own version, which used to force setuptools to be loaded at the start of a build, which would then add its vendored modules to sys.path.

[rokm]

Hmmm, I thought 47500a4 fixed problems like these. But apparently that's not the case - I can reproduce the ModuleNotFoundError on my side, and will need to look into what exactly goes wrong...

[pllim]

Does this mean pyinstaller needs a new release for astropy to pick up the commit? Sorry, I am not very familiar with pyinstaller. Thank you!

[rokm]

Ah, nevermind... I was testing with 6.16.0, which does not have that commit.

[rokm]

Does this mean pyinstaller needs a new release for astropy to pick up the commit? Sorry, I am not very familiar with pyinstaller. Thank you!

Yes, the next release of PyInstaller should have a fix for this issue.

[rokm]

Does this mean pyinstaller needs a new release for astropy to pick up the commit? Sorry, I am not very familiar with pyinstaller. Thank you!

Yes, the next release of PyInstaller should have a fix for this issue.

You could also install from PyInstaller's develop branch, but you would have to make sure to rebuild the bootloader, in case there are any incompatible modifications made to it in-between releases.

[pllim]

We would rather stick with stable version if we can downstream. Do you know when the next release with this patch will be out? Thank you very much for the prompt response!

[rokm]

We would rather stick with stable version if we can downstream. Do you know when the next release with this patch will be out? Thank you very much for the prompt response!

Probably very soon - otherwise we'll end up buried in duplicate reports of this (e.g., #9316).

[bwoodsend]

I'm doing the release now