Phoenix wxPython 4.0.7 fails to install with missing file error

Operating system: Manjaro i3 20.0.3 wxPython version & source: 4.0.7, from PyPI Python version & source: 3.8, from distro (in a venv)
Description of the problem: When attempting to install using poetry install the install cannot complete and this error is thrown (happens also when attempting to install with pip install wxPython==4.0.7 in a clean venv without poetry):

    copying symlink wx/libwx_baseu-3.0.so -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.8/wx/libwx_baseu-3.0.so
    error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'build/lib.linux-x86_64-3.8/wx/libwx_baseu-3.0.so

Thanks in advance.

Aug 13 '20 17:08 lightspot21

You're going to need to provide the entire log file for the installation.

Aug 13 '20 20:08 swt2c

Here it is (it's quite big, 2 MB of errors) error.log

Aug 14 '20 14:08 lightspot21

Very strange. I thought there would be a problem earlier in the log, but there wasn't. It seems that the installation can't create a broken symlink for some reason. Can you try this on your system?

mkdir testdir
ln -s testfile1 testdir/testfile2

Aug 14 '20 15:08 swt2c

Just tried it. No errors, but when attempting to ls the broken symlink is nowhere to be found. Inside testdir the symlink is visible and clearly marked as broken, like so:

Aug 14 '20 15:08 lightspot21

OK that seems to be working as expected. Thanks.

Aug 14 '20 16:08 swt2c

What filesystem is this on? Specifically, what filesystem is /tmp on?

Aug 14 '20 16:08 swt2c

Here's the output of df -T:

[lightspot21@Workbox-MK2 ~]$ df -T /tmp
Filesystem     Type   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs          tmpfs  3,9G   44M  3,8G   2% /tmp

So it's tmpfs.

Aug 14 '20 22:08 lightspot21

This is very very strange. I'm still scratching my head about it. It seems that you're not the only one, though: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61390486/wxpython-installation-failure

Aug 14 '20 23:08 swt2c

The only other thing I can think of - what language and locale do you have your system set to?

Aug 15 '20 01:08 swt2c

[lightspot21@Workbox-MK2 ~]$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_TIME=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_NAME=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

Aug 19 '20 19:08 lightspot21

This issue has been mentioned on Discuss wxPython. There might be relevant details there:

https://discuss.wxpython.org/t/pip-install-wxpython-failed/34925/4

Oct 06 '20 16:10 RobinD42

ran into the same issue. this is related to setuptools. i had a version greater 50 installed. i removed it and installed version 41.0.1. This works.

Oct 28 '20 10:10 jensgoe

@jensgoe, that's it! I upgraded setuptools before trying to install wxPython and now I can reproduce this. Thanks for that.

Oct 29 '20 15:10 swt2c

@swt2c I can confirm it works, thank you! (at least for this specific version, haven't checked others) Still, weird that it breaks if the version of setuptools changes. Also paging @RobinD42

Oct 31 '20 19:10 lightspot21

So, I think the cause is this change in setuptools: https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/commit/70e95ee66a17e1655f70c9dbda107cea958f583f

When copying files and the file is a broken symlink (because the target hasn't been copied yet), make_writable will fail because os.stat() by default follows symlinks and since the target doesn't yet exist, it returns a file not found error.

The reason this isn't a problem in 4.1.0 is that Robin has monkey patched make_writable to work around this problem: https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix/commit/aa8430ad391d93391988451f43ecedd76ca4dd77

I wonder though if this change to make_writable can/should be upstreamed in setuptools.

Nov 02 '20 01:11 swt2c

Same issue here on Mageia 8 no solution or workaround found so far