On Ubuntu 16.04.4, I suspect some recent update of some Python system package of having broken my Python 2.7 configuration. Whatever package I try to install or reinstall with a basic sudo python setup.py install it always fails because of gitignore:
running install
running bdist_egg
running egg_info
[...]
installing library code to build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg
running install_lib
running build_py
error: Error: setup script specifies an absolute path:
/home/me/some_repo/.gitignore
setup() arguments must *always* be /-separated paths relative to the
setup.py directory, *never* absolute paths.
Lately I found a temporary workaround by manually cleaning the /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/some_package directory manually before installing some_package. However tonight I'm facing the same issue on another repository and it keeps failing whatever I clean up. I also tried cleaning all compiled folders .egg-info/ build/ dist/ without success.
Notes: The setup script does not actually specify an absolute path to gitignore. An example of failing repo is https://github.com/philchristensen/python-artnet/blob/master/setup.py This repo has a setuptools_git entry which might lead to a clue, but other packages without this git entry point also fail because of the gitignore while a couple of months ago I never faced such issue with the same repos. Deleting the gitignore causes the setup to fail because of another non-py local file.
Any clue?
It looks like some other package that I had previously installed broke my system-wide Python.
Here's how I fixed in order to install package xyz:
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages in search for occurences of "gitignore"setuptools_git itself that matches "gitignore")pip install setuptools_gitrm -rf dist/ build/ *.egg-info/