byobu @5.133: byobu-config could not import the python snack module

[danielbair (Daniel Bair)]

When trying to run 'byobu-config' I get,

ERROR: Could not import the python snack module.

So I attempted to install snack with 'pip install snack' and that failed with an error. Then searching for that error lead me to learn that snack hasn't been ported to python3 and there is no solution (see ​https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/423515/byobu-not-working-on-new-installation-of-macos).

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Weird: the byobu port doesn't mention that it uses python. But you're right, the contents of byobu-config (aside from comments) are just:

#!/bin/sh -e

PKG="byobu"
[ -z "${BYOBU_PREFIX}" ] && export BYOBU_PREFIX="/opt/local" || export BYOBU_PREFIX
. "${BYOBU_PREFIX}/lib/${PKG}/include/common"

${BYOBU_PYTHON} "${BYOBU_PREFIX}/lib/${PKG}/include/config.py"

So the byobu port should declare a library dependency on whatever newest version of python it is compatible with and the build process should ensure that that version of python is used.

You can use pip to install modules for your own use in your own user directories (e.g. in a virtualenv) but shouldn't use it to try to install things into the system (MacPorts) directories.

[l2dy (Zero King)]

The Python integration is known to be broken. See #59930 and #44044.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

We're not talking about python integration. Here we're just talking about being able to run byobu-config at all. #59930 is just talking about being able to run byobu at all. If those basic programs of this port don't work and can't be fixed to work, there's no point to having this port, is there?

[danielbair (Daniel Bair)]

So far all other byobu programs except byobu-config seem to be working. I have the latest MacPorts running on Sonoma. I do not know if byobu upstream has a fix for this yet.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Here's the bug report filed with byobu about this in 2021 with no response: ​https://bugs.launchpad.net/byobu/+bug/1914879

Daniel, I got sidetracked a bit by your mention of the snack pip module. It took me a bit of research to understand that byobu is not looking for the snack 0.0.3 module currently on PyPI at ​https://pypi.org/project/snack/, which is an abandoned project of Cornell University for "Stochastic Neighbor and Crowd Kernel (SNaCK) embeddings: Quick and dirty visualization of large-scale datasets via concept embeddings". Homepage: ​https://vision.cornell.edu/se3/concept-embeddings/ (expired SSL certificate). GitHub: ​https://github.com/cornelltech/snack

Instead, byobu is looking for the snack module that is part of libnewt's python bindings and is used for developing text-based user interfaces. Hence the need for providing libnewt's python bindings in MacPorts as requested in #44044.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Replying to ryandesign:

Hence the need for providing libnewt's python bindings in MacPorts as requested in #44044.

This is now done and byobu-config now works if you first run sudo port install py312-libnewt and then run BYOBU_PYTHON=python3.12 byobu-config. Ideally, the byobu port would be enhanced to depend on py312-libnewt and to arrange for python 3.12 to be used automatically.