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Improve user experience for python bindings version mismatches

Open bradcray opened this issue 6 months ago • 0 comments

Twice recently, I've been hit by the message:

chapel python bindings are not built for python 3.12
make sure your current python version matches the one used to build chapel

and then not known what to do about it. As a developer / someone working from a copy of the repo, the answer seems to be to do:

rm -r third-party/chpl-venv/install/chpl-frontend*
make chplcheck

This issue asks what we could do to improve the user experience around this error message, specifically to make it more prescriptive. E.g., it's nice when you try and run the test system when it suggests you run make test-venv if you haven't or need to, but this error doesn't make suggestions like that.

My suggestion was to add a make clobber-frontend-py style command that would do the rm command above and then to have the error message suggest something like make clobber-frontend-py chplcheck or the like. One downside that Jade points out about this is that if a user is using a pre-built installation of Chapel (e.g., that a sysadmin added or that was installed through the package manager), the user may not actually want or be able to run these commands.

This issue is a placeholder to determine what we should do here, and to capture notes on how a developer can work past the error today.

bradcray avatar Aug 22 '24 16:08 bradcray